Deciphering I9 Verification with Chapelle Ryon

In this episode of the HRchat show, we offer insights and practical guidance to equip your organization for success, explore remote I-9 options, and reduce audit exposure.

Bill Banham's guest this time is Chapelle Ryon, the data-driven CEO behind WorkBright, an onboarding and recruitment platform for HR and recruitment teams.

Chapelle's team is on a mission to ease administrative burdens and Form I-9 pain for HR professionals. WorkBright’s market share in the onboarding space has been increasing exponentially in an uncertain I-9 world! In her tenure with the business, WorkBright has achieved triple bottom line status as a B Corp and consistently places on Outside Magazine’s Best Places to Work with strong financial results of 40% YoY growth and profitability.

Questions for Chapelle include: 

• WorkBright has been named a Best Place to Work by Outside for 4 years running! Congrats! What does it take to create and nurture a culture of engagement and innovation? 
• WorkBright is a Certified B Corporation. What does that say about the org and its values?
• WorkBright’s mission centers around Form I-9, which is a very specific space! Why build a product for a single specific form? Why does this matter for HR professionals?
• What changes have you observed in the I-9 space recently? Has anything changed since Covid?
• When you’re dealing with people’s personal data and a highly regulated space, how do you approach prioritizing these very high-demand needs?
• You mentioned an ebook, The Ultimate Guide to I-9 Compliance. Tell us more about this. Why might this be valuable for our listeners?

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.

Bill Banham: 0:26

Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. I'm your host today, bill Bannum. In this episode of the show, we're going to offer insights and some practical guidance to equip you and your organization for success. We're going to explore remote I9 options and we're going to hopefully help you reduce some audit exposure. My awesome, fabulous, wonderful guest today is Chappelle Ryan, the data-driven CEO behind Workbrite, an onboarding recruitment platform for HR and recruitment teams. Chappelle's team is on a mission to ease admin burdens and form I9 pain for HR pros. Chappelle, it's my pleasure to welcome you to the HR Chat Show today. How are you? Thanks very much for joining me.

Chapelle Ryon: 1:10

I am doing great, Bill. Thank you so much for having me on. I am really excited to get to talk about I9 today.

Bill Banham: 1:16

Beyond my reintroduction just a moment ago, chappelle, why don't you take a minute or two and tell our listeners how wonderful you are and what you're going to do?

Chapelle Ryon: 1:25

Well, I appreciate that. I think the introduction, the setup here, it says a lot of it. I'll just say again Chappelle Ryan, I'm CEO of Workbrite. I live in Denver, Colorado, although our company is fully remote. I'm sitting here in my home office with my two Bulldogs, ready to just tackle another great day with our amazing team here at Workbrite on a mission to ease paperwork burden.

Bill Banham: 1:50

Two amazing Bulldogs. What are their names?

Chapelle Ryon: 1:53

Larry and Barry as Bulldog names should be.

Bill Banham: 1:56

Larry and Barry love it, love it. We have a boy called Arthur and I always say to my other half if we have another one, I quite like Martha for a girl. I think that would be good. Okay, let's get into. We'll get into some of the details later, but at a high level. Chappelle, tell me about the mission of Workbrite. I'm going to challenge you because we will get into the details in a bit to do that in 60 seconds or less Go.

Chapelle Ryon: 2:23

Well, I don't even need 60 seconds. I can just tell you our mission is to be the best I9 provider in the world. Because you've given me 60 seconds, I'll elaborate just slightly. We do that through our mobile first onboarding solution. We allow employees to complete all of their paperwork before their first day and we believe that by speeding up that paperwork process particularly 4 my 9, which is the most cumbersome, burdensome form for HR administrators we're empowering people to get to work. So our 10-year target is we want to support 10% of the US workforce in starting their new job.

Speaker 1: 2:58

Thanks for tuning in to the HR Chat podcast. If you're enjoying this episode, we'd really appreciate it if you could subscribe and leave a five star review on your podcast platform of choice. And now back to the conversation.

Bill Banham: 3:15

Yeah, you really didn't need 60 seconds for that. Okay, I should have said 30. There we go. So Workbright is cool for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is it has been named a best placed work by outside for four years running Congratulations. So my question for you here is what does it take to create and nurture, to sustain a culture of engagement and a culture of innovation?

Chapelle Ryon: 3:43

That's a great question. So it really starts at the top, right From our early founding back in 2014,. We have had leadership myself being one of those and some co founders that took time to be deliberate about creating an organization. We say that measures it's worth not only on what it gains but what it gives back to its people, the community and the customers that we service. So how we practice this, our core values really aren't just words on a website. We hire, we fire against them, we tailor our performance reviews around them, that we're measuring everyone to make sure that we're all kind of coming in with the same culture and values that we all want to be here.

Chapelle Ryon: 4:23

What I always say is I want to come into work every day ready to solve the challenges of the business with the people around the table, and our core values really allow us to decide like who is that person that's going to work really well here?

Chapelle Ryon: 4:34

And there's a right person for every organization. We've really honed in on who that is here at Workbright, innovation being like a key pillar of what we want to see in our employees, and we believe that by empowering every person that works here to think like an entrepreneur right, it's more valuable for our employees to try and fail and learn from that failure than it is for them to have never tried in the first place, because they're worried about being perfect. So we start by defining what is it that makes a really good fit for working here at Workbright we find those awesome people that have that learning mindset, that are caring. Peers is the language we use to each other, and then we empower them and let them do their thing and we set clear vision from the top. So everyone's aligned in the same direction and I think that we've just created a really special place, which is why we continue to get those awesome accolades like outside best places to work.

Bill Banham: 5:29

Can I just add you've got amazing energy. I think you started your answer there by saying it all comes from the top and you're right up there at the top of the organization. Your energy is awesome and it must be very inspiring, so well done. But Workbright is also a certified B Corp. What does that say about the organization and its values?

Chapelle Ryon: 5:52

I love talking about our B Corp status. It really has been transformational for our organization and I may have the energy at the top, but I can't take credit for the B Corp certification. This was our original founder, dave Secunda, that really thought that this aligned very well with who we wanted to be as an organization. I was at the time in the COO role and I'll just be honest, for people that are looking at it, it was costly, both financially for the business, resource wise for our employees and I was sitting here going do we really want to pursue all this? We had to up benefits, a lot of areas. We had to focus on different things. We had to incorporate it into every aspect of the organization in order to secure the certification. And man, I'm so glad that he pushed for it because it has just been so key in aligning our organization with who we want to be, to our employees and to our customers.

Chapelle Ryon: 6:42

So we really believe that reducing barriers to people being able to find work so that's the paperwork that we work with right Like reducing that barrier, making paperwork completion easier, is for the public benefit. It empowers people to get to work. That is what we do, that is at our core and that is kind of right within certified B Corp standards of saying like, how is what you do for public benefit? And so by allowing us to kind of lean into that part of the business, it has just gotten us all aligned with transparency, accountability, a lot of the things. It gives us the external benchmark that we need to say how are we really doing stacking up and are we serving public benefit with our products and services?

Bill Banham: 7:23

work bright mission centers around the the I9 form, of course, which is a very specific space. Why build a product for a single specific form? Why does that matter, and why does that specifically matter for HR pros?

Chapelle Ryon: 7:40

That's right. So so I will say because I recognize that you have a global audience here and for my nine is a US based specific form. That said, if you are working with any US workers, there's some pretty specific legislation in here about who does and does not need to complete for my nine. So if you're working with US citizens or international citizens that may be living in the US for a temporary period or extended period, you may need to also be listening to for my nine stuff. Outside of that, we also have a full onboarding product. So we have our state tax forms, handbooks, custom forms. We really do support with all of the new hire paperwork that comes in. But you're right that we do have a standalone product specifically for four my nine. It is our focus, as I said, best I9 provider in the world and the reason that we focus specifically on that form is because it touches all of our customers, right, Everyone needs to complete four my nine in the US and it's a super burdensome form for both employers and employees, right, so it is highly regulated.

Chapelle Ryon: 8:44

There's hefty fines In 2022, I think DHS hiked the fines, right, so fines vary from like $40 all the way up to thousands, and I had seen that they issued the largest fine ever to an employer.

Chapelle Ryon: 8:57

That was over $1.5 million. So you know the HR professionals that are listening to this. The majority of them didn't get into HR to deal with paperwork. They got into it to deal with people, and yet this thing that is in their sphere of influence can be the thing that actually costs the business thousands, if not millions, and large organizations. So by easing this pain this is why it's so important for HR professionals by taking this burden off of them I mean, we've had people cry on demos before and that's an extreme example but it's like this thing that keeps them up at night where they got into the HR profession because they wanted to help and support people and now all of a sudden, they could be putting the company in jeopardy because of this other side. We really feel passionately about easing that administrative burden so they can get back to doing what they love and working with the people.

Bill Banham: 9:47

Okay, let's talk about what's going on at the moment. Then, what changes have you observed in the I9 space recently, and has anything specifically changed since COVID? If so, what?

Chapelle Ryon: 9:57

Oh, wow. So I'm trying to decide how to fit this into a short podcast, but this has been a wild year for I9. Those that have been dealing with it will know this, but I'll do it really fast top level. And we have a guide on this, specifically on Workbitecom, if you want to learn more. But when the pandemic started, early 2020.

Chapelle Ryon: 10:17

Uscis allowed a version of virtual review. So prior to that 2020 period, you had to physically inspect work authorization documentation. They started allowing virtual review because of the limitations with pandemic. That was set to expire on July 31st. So for about three years, people had been doing this virtual review process and the government had always said you will need to physically re-inspect those documents once we are done with this virtual review. So they always said you had to reconcile, but they kept bumping it out three months, three months, three months. So no one really took this July 31st deadline seriously until May 4th when they said no, guys, this is really it. You need to have all of your I-9s that you virtually reviewed for the last three years reconciled by August 30th. So with that data, we had customers coming to us with thousands of I-9s that suddenly, in the course of two months, needed to be physically re-inspected.

Chapelle Ryon: 11:10

We had a crazy summer helping people. This is right what our product does. We have a patent pending process around using an authorized representative to complete that section two, physical review. So how we do it is we have geolocation technology. An employee can elect their own authorized representative. It sends them a text message. We geo-funds the two people together to make sure they're in the same place at the same time for the purpose of completing physical review. We walk them through a short guide of what they're doing. They inspect the documents, compare those against what was submitted in Workright and then they sign, under penalty of perjury, that they're authorizing as employee on their section two for my nine. So we had this flood of customers coming into leverage this technology that we have.

Chapelle Ryon: 11:54

Then, 10 days before that deadline so July 31st was the deadline 10 days before that, they came out and said wait, wait, wait, we are going to do a complete overhaul. On four my nine. You can now do a different version of virtual review, but it is still a virtual review, which is an awesome thing that they've added. Employers were leveraging this because it was a real need for their business. We're happy that they made the change. They just did it pretty close to the deadline and it created a bunch of confusion in what employers needed to do to get these reconciled.

Chapelle Ryon: 12:27

If you're out there and you're thinking I virtual reviewed, they're now allowing virtual review. I'm now compliant. You are not. You still need to get those virtually reviewed COVID-1s reinspecated. In some cases you can use virtual review again to do that. It seems silly, but it's true. In most cases you cannot Check out this guide. I'm going to pause here because you saved you, like my passion, but it will go a little too far for a 20-minute podcast. I'll just leave it there and say it's been a wild year. Covid created a lot of upheaval in four. My nine we're here to help support you in getting your I-9s back where they need to be.

Speaker 4: 13:08

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Bill Banham: 13:43

Okay, wonderful when you're dealing with people's personal data. This is terribly important with people's personal data and highly in a very highly regulated space. How do you approach prioritizing these high demand needs?

Chapelle Ryon: 13:59

Yeah, you're right. I mean we do have people's most sensitive data right their work authorization, their social security numbers. In our full onboarding suite. We have a lot of payroll data. We immigrate with payroll systems to send direct deposit information. Here's the prioritization that we go through.

Chapelle Ryon: 14:15

Number one we're talking about 4x9 fines. Associated with that Number one is compliance. We work with two of the nation's leading I-9 attorneys. They check all of our workflows before they go out the door. If we're thinking about developing something new, we make sure that it's going to be compliant.

Chapelle Ryon: 14:29

We go so far within this that we stand behind our product with indemnification around any fines that would be related to our process, because we indemnify customers against that. We make sure that everything we're putting out is compliant with USCIS 4x9 regulations. So compliance is number one. Security, though, is a very, very close number two. We deal, like I said, with that most sensitive information. We uphold ourselves to sock to high trust profiles, all of the industry best practices out there around bank grade security, and we do some creative things to make sure that this is ingrained into our culture, that security is top of mind for every employee, including like we run annual critical incident simulations. We actually hire actors to call in. We inject stuff into our code to see if our engineering team can vet out.

Chapelle Ryon: 15:18

If something were to happen, if an attack were to happen in real life, how would we respond to it? How would we make sure that customer's data is secure? Where are any holes? We're constantly poking and testing at our product to make sure that we're keeping people's information as secure as we possibly can. Then past that.

Chapelle Ryon: 15:34

So it's compliance and security and I'm getting a little outside of your question, but I'm gonna keep going here because we have four North stars compliance, security, and then speed and throughput is three and four. So once we know that we are compliant in the way that we're doing things, once we know that your data is secure, we're gonna get you going as fast as you can through that four by nine process. A lot of our customers can complete all the way from section one through section two in under 10 minutes and then throughput. So we have an embedded version where you can take our technology and put it into a customer facing app, an employee facing app, so that they can complete that whole process from your ATS apply for a job, get the job, fill up four by nine and get to time and scheduling. We focus on that throughput piece as three and four.

Bill Banham: 16:19

Okay, thank you very much. Now I'd like to talk a little bit about your ebook, the Ultimate Guide to I9 Compliance. Shabelle, tell us about the ebook and why it might be valuable to them.

Chapelle Ryon: 16:33

Yeah well, if you've made it this far in the podcast, then you recognize that I'm a complete I9 nerd and we have a full staff of I9 nerds. As the craziness of COVID stuff was going on, over the summer we put out a series of webinars. We were doing them like every other week with thousands of attendees just trying to educate people on what was going on with four by nine. And in that kind of panel was myself, our founder, Dave Secunda, and Kimberly Robodeau, who's one of those attorneys that I was talking about, who just totally leads and rocks in this area, and she joined us to help us answer questions around four by nine. And so what we did was we took all those questions that came over across the summer and said here are the common ones that we think people could really benefit from having, and we answered them all in one ebook.

Chapelle Ryon: 17:19

So I think there's over 50 questions, ranging from simple things like can I use white out on an I9? Short answer, no. Two very complex questions like can a notary in California serve as an authorized representative? So we tried to really pull out the common themes that we were hearing all summer, put them in a beautifully designed our marketing team is awesome and they try to make for my nine content a little more sexy than it may seem to be, so we packaged it up in a way that was really understandable for customers that are looking for answers. I think it's fantastic. I encourage you guys to go to workbrightcom and download it. Very searchable, easy way to get answers to some really important nine, nine questions.

Bill Banham: 18:02

Rock and roll. We are almost at the end of this particular conversation already. I can't believe it. Before we wrap up, though, how can our listeners connect with you? So I bet, because you're super cool, you're all over things like TikTok, but also LinkedIn email addresses, anything you want to share there and, of course, how can they learn more about workbright and the amazing content that you guys are creating?

Chapelle Ryon: 18:25

Yeah, so I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn, please. My name's a little tricky, so I'll spell it out it's Chappelle C-H-A-P-E-L-L-E. Last name is Ryan R-Y-O-N, so please look me up on LinkedIn, connect, give me feedback on this podcast. I'm happy to answer nine, nine questions as well, and then, of course, visit us at workbright. So it is b-r-i-g-h-tcom and that's where you can find that ebook that I referenced the I-9 reconciliation guide. If you want that, we've got a ton of great thought leadership in the I-9 space that I invite you to visit and download and consume and give us that feedback.

Bill Banham: 19:01

Wonderful. Well Chappelle, with the difficult name to spell. Thank you very much for being my guest on this episode of the HR Chat Show.

Chapelle Ryon: 19:11

Thank you so much for having me, bill I really enjoyed the time today and thanks for listening to me gosh about I-9.

Bill Banham: 19:17

And listeners as always. Until next time, happy working.

Speaker 1: 19:24

Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit HR Gazettecom.