Espria Implements Identity Checks on New Employees with Zero Effort

At Harmonizer, we are proud to provide integration managed services to Espria, a large health care organisation in the Netherlands. Espria strives to empower the vulnerable as much as possible while providing them with excellent care.

With over 17,000 employees, Espria has a high volume of Human Resources (HR) tasks to do, every day. And with ever increasing compliance obligations in HR, it isn’t always easy to achieve the required turn-around times with the same complement of staff.

This is where integrations come in handy, to alleviate the pressure on HR staff, and even enhance employee experience since repetitive, manual tasks are no longer required to be done by staff.

Compliance in HR

In the Netherlands, as in many other jurisdictions, organisations are required to identify their employees. Amongst others, this is done because tax regulation requires it. Often, we see this is still done manually, and could look something like this:

• The department manager sends email and congratulates new employee on being successful in applying for a role. They ask for a copy of their identification documents, to be sent back to them by a certain day.
• The new employee might forget or overlook the email.
• The department manager needs to make a note to remind the new employee, and might need to do this several times. Meanwhile, they may need to manually update their applicant tracking and/ or HR system.
• Once the department manager receives the copies, these need to be forwarded to an organisation that professionally checks the future employee’s identity. And the department manager updates the applicant tracking / HR system.
• The department manager needs to monitor the result comes back on time and needs to process this in the applicant tracking and/or HR system.
• Once all is processed, the department manager needs to get back to the new employee with confirmations, and possibly other paperwork, etc.

There are obviously many different ways the above process could run, however they are variations on the ‘manual’ theme. Even if the candidate needs to come in and show their ID in person, this is error prone and places an onus on the candidate to make an additional ‘physical’ trip to the HR employee’s office location.

On top of the inconvenience, there is the risk of these sensitive documents lying around somewhere insecure, which could have large consequences in the event of the (nowadays) unavoidable cyber breach. Not to mention that dealing with this information requires strict protocols, and we’ve seen many instances of these manual processes that weren’t in compliance with laws and regulations that apply to personally identifiable information in design, implementation, or execution.

Based on our experience, integrating this process via appropriate technology is an elegant, low cost solution that enhances everyone’s experience in this process. This approach also saves cost because of the efficiencies they create which outweigh the monthly subscription fee.

Harmonizer for Espria

Espria opted to use CheckedID from JanusID as a solution for the identification services. CheckedID ensures compliant processes with PII laws and regulations (mainly the Algemene Verordening Gegevensbescherming, or AVG in the Netherlands, of which the Privacy Act 1988 would be the Australian equivalent).

In order to ensure a smooth process between Espria and CheckedID, Harmonizer provides the following process activities in a fully automated fashion:

• In real time, Harmonizer extracts candidate information for those candidates that are marked as ‘hired’ from Emply, Espria’s applicant tracking system. The most important data points are the name of the candidate, email, and the name of the organisational unit.
• Throughout the below process, Harmonizer keeps the status in the applicant tracking system up to date.
• Harmonizer processes this information and sends it to CheckedID to initiate a Digital ID check.
• Harmonizer subsequently writes back information to the applicant tracking system such as the URL for the candidate and ID check number, and triggers functionality in the applicant tracking system to send the candidate an invitation to complete their ID check.
• The candidate receives the invitation email and completes the ID check using the iOS / Android app provided by CheckedID. The candidate scans their passport and takes a selfie using their mobile device.
• Once the candidate completes the ID check, CheckedID notifies Harmonizer of the completion.
• Harmonizer looks up the candidate in a an internal administration, and downloads the PDF report from CheckedID and writes this back to the applicant tracking system, along with various bespoke metadata points in a separate form.
• The HR employee receives an email from the applicant checking system that the ID check report is ready, and can continue with finalising the hiring process, without spending any time on the ID check

For Espria, implementing Harmonizer has unburdened the department managers, who have always been tasked with the identification of new employees. It has freed up time for them that can be spent on actually managing the team. In addition, the Harmonizer integration has led to lower cost of compliance with tax an privacy regulations.

At Harmonizer, we are always looking to increase our value to our clients and will continue to invest in proactively raising further opportunities for automation, savings and value. Other live use cases include:

• Automated postings and responses between an applicant tracking system and job boards
• Automated employee on-boarding, once they are identified as ‘hired’ in the applicant tracking system. Their information would flow to the HR system, and accounts for other systems could be created as well, in one automated flow
• Automatically setting the application tracking system up with the most essential master data, like the organizational structures and the user accounts for recruiters and HR.

Please reach out in case you believe any of the above options could be of value to your organisation and your HR team. We are happy to help!

Photo by Dominik Lange on Unsplash