Welcome to the Next-Gen of Monitoring

By Bruce Myers | 11th June 2020

Remember when the Blackberry was the ultimate smartphone? When MySpace ruled social media? Or when everyone had a Hotmail account?

How about when TV was broadcast in real-time and you had to be on the couch in time to catch your favorite show? When movies were rented from a store? Or when email was the primary form of digital communication?

These examples represent first-generation concepts that served to set the bar for what would follow. And what has followed continues to evolve into next- and next- and next-generation – each better and more advanced than the previous.

This is exactly what’s happening in the background screening industry. We are seeing new technologies and systems arise to bring improvement to everything from federal searches to verifications. (Remember neighborhood interviews?)

The latest such product to hit the screening industry is monitoring. The basic concepts and ideas around monitoring are sound and compelling, but the first and early generation products left a lot to be desired. Sure, there has been new lipstick on periodic rechecks (secondary source database searches), fresh pings of information such as arrests and incarcerations, but these are oh so complicated and dangerous for HR and compliance.

Continuous monitoring has been ready for a next-generation concept – something that would render the others as obsolete as the TV guide. Continuous monitoring from Wholesale Screening has done just that. We took a hard look at early generation versions of monitoring and re-thought what monitoring could and should really look like. And we came up with a solution that does all of this:

  1. Tells a complete and accurate story with complete disposition and sentencing data, allowing CRAs to deliver accuracy and completeness (the hallmarks of FCRA compliance).
  2. Includes customizable data sets and sources that can be adapted to meet specific risk requirements by end-users and by roles at the end-user organization.
  3. Delivers actionable information that end users can use to make informed decisions and take action at the right time.

Drawing from current court records and federal court records data, we have taken monitoring to a whole new level. Learn more here.

Looking back now at so many first-generation products – from the rotary phone to the Walkman – we can clearly see their shortcomings. Without continual improvement and investment in innovation, those first-gen products would not have evolved to what they are today. When it comes to monitoring, without the investment made in creating what we have today, the industry would be stuck in the past, being of little to no value to end-users and placing HR in a tough spot.

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