By: Bruce Myers and Bryan Snow
A year ago, Wholesale Screening launched what we thought was a groundbreaking, industry-changing solution to address one of the hottest topics in human capital risk today. Unlike traditional arrest records-based monitoring, our continuous court records monitoring solution helps companies avoid negligent retention liability by providing actionable, authoritative information.
We’ve learned a lot over the past year. Here are a few of our biggest takeaways:
- People get it, then they really get it.
Over the past year, we’ve had several hundred or more conversations about our court records monitoring solution and we’ve never had a single person say, “This solution isn’t for me” or “I’m not seeing the value here.” This has been incredibly promising and validating as we’ve seen awareness rise. But where we’ve seen the most dramatic response is from CRAs who actually test the technology with anonymized employee rosters. When we put away the words and concepts and they just try it, the lightbulb really turns on as they see and hear and understand. It’s like seeing an automobile for the first time.
There’s no other solution like this in the marketplace so we’ve been seeing the light bulb moments on a weekly basis for the past year.
- Change is hard.
The information coming out of our continuous monitoring technology can really only be described as dramatic. In this way, people are understanding the power of the solution, but we’re also seeing them struggle to determine what to do with the information. What will an employer do when they discover the armed security guard working for their company has just been booked on weapons charges? The discovery of information like this (and you can imagine the many similar examples across industries) creates a hardship for the employer because now they have to take action. It’s different from pre-employment screening because the employer could simply avoid hiring the person in the first place. But with this, the employer may have to remove someone from their position and that’s where employers are having to learn how to drive the car. “How do we take action?” With the Wholesale monitoring solution, CRAs are turning on the lights in the room and employers are saying, now what do we do?
Change takes time. And that’s okay.
- The technology adoption lifecycle applies here.
The technology adoption curve process for new innovations is typically illustrated as a classic bell curve in which “innovators” are the first group of people to use a new product, followed by “early adopters.” Next, come the early majority and late majority, and the last group to eventually adopt a product are called “laggards.” This has rung true for our continuous monitoring solution as well. Right now, we’re in the early adopter’s stage.
We predict court records monitoring will be catapulted into majority-level adoption in one of two ways: Organically as the adoption curve runs its course or dramatically, as it happened in the early days of traditional pre-employment background screening. In the early days of background screening, a legal prescient emerged that catapulted the background screening industry in mainstream adoption. A negligent hiring case involving a pizza delivery driver who attacked a customer in her home was found to have a similar record in the past. The judgment against the pizza company spotlighted the lesson for employers that If you could have known, you should have known. Fast forward to 2020-2021 and negligent retention is the hot topic and court records monitoring reinforces the negligent retention issue because, again, if an employer could have known, the courts are saying, they should have known. Now that a solution exists to help employers prevent negligent retention, there are things they could know. And should know.
All in all, as a company, we at Wholesale have experienced a huge learning experience over the past year as we watch our CRA partners and their customers implement the monitoring solution and learn how to quickly implement it. We are seeing a big opportunity for our CRA partners to grow by making the unknowns known and sharing best practices about how to deal with an employee once a record is found.
Interested in chatting about this more or testing our continuous court records monitoring? Contact us.
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