In this HRchat episode, we look at ensuring data privacy of employees and some dos and don'ts of managing automated verifications of employment and income.
Bill Banham is joined by Bill Roy, President at Vault Verify, a company on a mission to help HR departments save time and money by providing fast and accurate data. Vault Verify is a cloud-based technology platform that helps automate the process of completing verifications of income and employment.
Questions Include:
Responding manually to verification requests costs lots of money and HR hours. And frankly, in this labor market, it can be an absolute mountain to climb! Talk about your company; explain Vault Verify's 'how' and share the 'why' as it pertains to helping Talent pros, HR teams, and hiring managers.
Your tech provides automated options for verification of income and employment, I-9, and unemployment claims management. Where are the big time and cost savings? Can you share stats and maybe a use case?
Data Privacy: Talk to me about how Vault Verify approaches and ensures data privacy requirements are met (on the corp and employee sides) and what else is happening out there in the marketplace? (Maybe this could include findings/reports showing e.g. other companies knowingly or otherwise sharing candidate data multiple times and what that could mean for the data privacy of candidates and employees).
Follow up: What are the corporate liabilities associated with mismanagement of employee data?
Customer satisfaction: You claim to have a 99% customer retention rate. Tell us about your approach.
More About Vault Verify
Vault Verify leverages APIs to produce a quick, easy implementation experience. Vault Verify is free to clients and Vault shares a portion of the revenue derived from commercial requesters with the client each month, making HR a profit center. The results for clients are dramatic: increased productivity, more accurate verifications and decreased liability. And HR generates monthly revenue for other HR priorities. Learn more at vaultverify.com.
We do our best to ensure editorial objectivity. The views and ideas shared by our guests and sponsors are entirely independent of The HR Gazette, HRchat Podcast and Iceni Media Inc.
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Speaker 2:
Welcome to another episode of the HR chat podcast. I'm your host today, bill Banham. And in this episode, we're going to look at ensuring data privacy of employees and some do's and don'ts of managing automated verifications of employment and income. This episode must surely be subtitled the bill and bill show, as I'm joined by bill Roy president at vote, verify a company on a mission to help HR departments save time and money by providing fast and accurate data volts. Verify is a cloud-based tech platform that helps automate the process of completing verifications of income and employment. Bill. It's absolutely wonderful to welcome my namesake onto the pod today. And before we get into the usual questions via bill, um, I should just check with you. Are you, are you actually, are you really a William who also took that daring leap into the way HIPAA world of being called?
Speaker 3:
Well, bill, thank you for having me today. It's a pleasure to be here. Huge fan of the HR chat podcast and yes, you are a hundred percent correct. Uh, I am a William officially. Um, I've taken bill after being called, uh, Billy by my mother for a long time during my childhood. And around 10 years old, I hit that rebellion phase and said, now I'm going to be a bill from now on. So, um, I'm assuming yours is substantially similar, but uh, yeah, we're William and much more informally bill
Speaker 2:
Beyond that reintroduction and establishing how cool your name is. Maybe you can take a minute or two and introduce yourself a bit more. Tell me about your career background experience and your role over at volt verify.
Speaker 3:
Sure, thanks. Yeah. So I've really been working with HR departments for 35 years now. Um, mostly in the HR tech world. Um, so helping them deliver value by using technology eliminating, um, kind of tedious tasks within HR. And so with vault verify, that's exactly our goal there is to reduce the manual labor burden. Um, but yeah, uh, I've had a great experience working with HR of all corporate sizes, small, medium, and large, and, um, the goal remains the same to, to help that department be more efficient.
Speaker 2:
So you better, thank you very much. Uh, let's get into the why of vote verify then, um, responding manually to verification requests costs lots of time and many, many HR hours, of course. And, and, and frankly, in, in this crazy labor market, uh, it can, it can be an absolute mountain to climb and probably not doable. Tell me about your company, explain, but verifies how and share maybe the why as it pertains to helping talent pros, HR teams and hiring managers.
Speaker 3:
Yeah. Uh, I mean, that's a great question. Uh, first off in you're absolutely right. Um, HR personnel are just burdened with all types of tasks today and there are strategic and non-strategic involved. Verifi is really focused on eliminating some of the non-strategic tasks, primarily completing these verifications from employment income, um, people that are applying for a loan or mortgage or, uh, previous employees that have moved on. And when HR teams are tasked with that, um, they're unable to focus on some of the more strategic endeavors such as onboarding or training or recruiting. Um, that's really critical to a company. So our goal from the beginning was to eliminate what we call obligatory HR labor burden. Uh, again, I think it's self explanatory, but the HR departments feel obligated to complete these requests to help an employee or previous employee, but it really doesn't help the company growth or strategy any. Um, so that's where vault verify really comes in to automate that task, get it off of their plate and let them focus on the strategic tasks.
Speaker 2:
Your platform provides automated options, bill for verification of income and employment, as we've mentioned so far, but also I nine and unemployment claims management, where are the, where are the big time and cost savings? Can you, can you share stats or maybe, maybe use case if you can, in terms of your, of those perhaps one or two of them are the real time sucks and, and, and the real expenses, or maybe all of them cost lots of money and lots of time. Yeah,
Speaker 3:
Absolutely. So verification, income and employment. These individual requests might take 10 minutes for an individual to complete. So you multiply that. If you look at a company of 5,000 employees, they're going to complete somewhere between 1,015 hundred verification requests per year. So at 10 minutes per that's a whole lot of hours that that individual that's completing these requests could be spent spending on more strategic tasks, right? So by taking that off of their plate, we look at a labor savings somewhere in the order of$10 a piece. So if you're completing a thousand verification requests a year, that's$10,000 a year, that you've just removed from the labor burden, um, again, to refocus that it might be a soft cost, but there's a cost nonetheless, as you get into companies, it's even a bigger task. Um, they might have one or two people that are dedicated to completing these, where if you automate it, uh, not only are you saving that labor costs, um, but you're actually reducing liability by providing a more consistent process and auditable process. Um, that is really better for the company in obviously, uh, removing this obligatory labor burden.
Speaker 2:
Okay. Let's get into data privacy now, bill, um, because it's very important. And I think in this, in this space, it's sometimes a little bit misunderstood and perhaps even, um, not always managed the way, the way they could be. Talk to me about how, how volt verify approaches and ensures data privacy requirements are met and what else is happening out there in the marketplace.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, that's a fantastic question. And really a core pillar of vault verify is data privacy. Um, historically speaking in this space, uh, clients would take and send a file with all of this employee data, pay data, start date, end date, including, uh, social security or fin depending on the country. And they would ship it off to a vendor and that vendor, um, unfortunately might utilize that data in a myriad of ways that were never intended. So they might indicate that gee, we think collection agents, uh, or credit card companies for their latest gold card offer, uh, or credit karma these days that those are permissible purposes, even though the employee hasn't consented to that use of their data. Um, so evolve, verify, we have really limited this in two ways. Number one, um, we eliminated file feeds and in mass storage of this data outside of the client's HRIF system, that's critically important. You can have a client with 5,000 employees that during the course of 52 weeks in a year is sending that entire base of data to a vendor every single week. It's just an enormous amount of records with potential for data exposure or misuse. So at vault verify, we treat these verifications much like the employer would themselves. We don't consider collection agents or lawyers on behalf of collection agents or credit karma, unless the employee is truly consented to it as permissible purpose. They aren't because the employee never consented to it upfront. Um, and so I think unwittingly employers are largely contribute, contributing to liability for their company by providing this data to a vendor who might ultimately be misusing or misappropriating that data in order to monetize it. And again, vault verify from the beginning and said, we are never going to fulfill verification requests for which the employee hasn't consented. Um, and, and I think that is largely the crux of this data, privacy that GDPR and CCPA and privacy shield are trying to, um, understand and trying to create laws around so that this data isn't misappropriated, but unfortunately some of the companies out there, some of the vendors in this space kind of eliminate themselves from that bar, uh, by calling themselves a service provider and continuing to misuse data. Um, it's, it's a really a critical issue that we think is gonna continue to bear fruit. Um, and it continued to evolve towards the employee privacy data aspect, uh, in the years to come.
Speaker 2:
Okay. Thank you very much up question here, bill. Uh, what, what, uh, and you, you spoke to stand a little bit about, uh, potential liabilities. What, what all those corporate liabilities associated with mismanagement of candidate or employee data, uh, and you know, maybe, maybe you can spell out how much hot water a company could get into, even if the unknowingly doing the wrong things.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, that's a great question. It's a little difficult to quantify until someone, uh, finally gets a hold of this, right. Um, and, and tries to take the employers to task. I think by and large HR departments, uh, HR departments are trying to do the right thing. They're trying to, uh, save time, save money for the company. Um, but they have to be very much aware of what their vendors are doing with data. Um, because there certainly could be liability for the company by selecting the wrong vendor. Um, uh, you know, we saw some huge data breaches a couple of years ago. We continue to see an emphasis on that. Um, if you go back to our original 5,000 life company where, all right, let's say they're going to do 1500 verifications per year. A real time integration environment would allow for the passing of 1500 records. If you look at that same 5,000 employees and you look at transferring a full file of data every single week, that could be 260,000 employee records per year when only 1500 are required to fulfill verification requests. So the gap there is enormous, uh, you know, 99% plus of that data that's being transferred. It's completely unnecessary. So I think this is going to cause employers to look more closely at their vendors and more closely at whether or not this data transfer is really necessary. And then of course what's happening with that data. Um, you know, it's only gonna take one lawyer to say, gee, um, ha do you understand what that vendor's doing with this data? Um, and maybe you should have selected a better vendor to create, or maybe put a number on that liability for companies. And I know many of them, many of the fortune 500 companies we're speaking with these days are very, very interested in taking it to that next level of data security and securing the privacy of their employees.
Speaker 2:
I feel like we need to get you back on and just focus a bit more on what's going on in the world of data security and, and additional tips for how, how companies can, uh, try and mitigate and limit any risks. But that's, that's a conversation for another time because we don't have long enough today, bill. So instead I want to chat to you a bit about, uh, customer satisfaction. Um, again, in, in our, in our discovery call, uh, we, we spoke a bit about, uh, I'm pretty, uh, pretty incredible number. Okay. So, so you, you claim to have a 99% customer retention rates, and I'm assuming, um, bill that from, from the impressive list of clients on your site, that, that that's, that is, is from a significant sample size. It's not a sample size of one or something. Um, but, but seriously, uh, you and I spoke off Mike and, and you were very proud of volt verifies track record when it comes to customer satisfaction and retention. Tell me a little bit more about your approach and how you guys work with customers so that they're happy and they stay with you year after year.
Speaker 3:
Yes, we are incredibly proud of it. Um, we have been utilizing just over the past three months, NPS scoring with our customer base, uh, and over the CA the course of the last three months alone, I think we've done something like 65 business reviews with clients. Um, simply where we ask them, would you refer us to a friend or a colleague 100% of them have said yes, absolutely unequivocally. So, um, the fact that we do have a 99% customer retention rate, and I'll say, I think the only two clients we've we've lost, um, or because they were moving to an HR payroll system where, um, they hadn't a lot of us to create this time integration yet. So, um, aside from that, we do have 100% customer satisfaction and we're incredibly proud of it, but that was accomplished by design, by giving the employers the type of platform that they need more configurable mirror, their compensation earnings allow both the employee and the employer to see everything that we've done on their behalf. Um, that visibility that, um, real time data knowledge is really what helps create the customer satisfaction beyond that it's having dedicated service folks, dedicated account managers, um, that really work with the clients to ensure that not only in the implementation, but on an ongoing basis, we are providing 100% of what that client needs and expects from their verification vendor. And I would also say that that the data privacy, how we treat their data is also a huge part of that client satisfaction. Um, but yeah, in my 35 years in business, I've never seen an organization that was really close to 100% client satisfaction. So it is a focal point for us. Um, the, the customer is king and, and that's the way we built our business. So I think the results, um, are even better than what I had hoped for, but, um, certainly in line with what we were aiming for.
Speaker 2:
Oh, well, I'm, I'm, I'm shocked there because, uh, my assumption was that your customers stay with you remain happy because they're working with a cool dude called bill, as opposed to one of these, you know, traditional guys called William, but there we go. Okay. Um, we are coming towards the end of this interview already, bill, uh, before we, before we do wrap up, though, I'd love to invite you to tell that our folks listening out there, how they can connect with you. So maybe through LinkedIn, perhaps you want to share your email address, whatever you'd like to do there may be on Tik TOK, and you wanna tell people about that. Um, and also how can they learn more about everything happening over at Volk verify?
Speaker 3:
Yes. Well, thank you, bill. Uh, obviously it's been a pleasure speaking with you today. Uh, I'd encourage anyone out there that really does want to learn more. You can certainly visit our website at all. verify.com. You can feel free to reach out to me directly at bill dot Roy at volt, verify.com. Um, I work pretty much all the time. That's the nature of being an entrepreneur. So I tend to be very responsive, would love to schedule time with you with your organization, learn more about your goals and how we might be able to assist as well and protecting your employee data, providing a better environment, uh, and giving you the visibility to that data that you are hopefully searching for. So thank you, bill. Um, it's been a pleasure, as I said, look forward to seeing you again, uh, on the same bat channel,
Speaker 2:
Same bat channel, same bat time listeners. Um, I just like to add when, when I, uh, have a conversation with someone who, uh, I find is authentic and warm, um, and rather pleasant to, to have a conversation with, I like to give them the kudos on this show. And, um, certainly my experience of working with bill so far has been, uh, has been a very pleasurable one. And, um, uh, it sounds like listeners that if you are interested to learn more, you can call bill at three o'clock in the morning and he will pick up that just leaves me to say for today until next time listeners as always happy working.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for listening to the HR chat podcast brought to you by the HR. Does that.