Cisive
At the Forefront of Providing Innovative HCM Solutions

A global provider of compliance-driven human capital management and risk management solutions, Cisive’s core onboarding and pre-employment background screening offering provides clients with a streamlined, high quality, and regulatory compliant solution. The company’s comprehensive services include background screening, vendor/contractor screening, executive screening, drug testing, fingerprinting, paperless onboarding, and electronic Form I-9/E-Verify solutions.

Founded in 1977 as CARCO Group Inc., the company launched its new brand Cisive in 2017 to keep pace with incredible growth and clients’ increasingly complex challenges for accurate information and insights to make confident decisions. Today, Cisive provides comprehensive global background investigations on potential and current employees, vendors, clients, and business partners. The company also provides drug testing and fingerprinting services through alliance partners. The following conversation that CIO Applications had with Jim Owens, President and CEO at Cisive, discusses the company’s expertise in the specific risks and regulations that apply to the financial services and other highly regulated industries. He also elaborates on how Cisive, for over 40 years, provided tailored solutions to meet the unique requirements of our enterprise clients and launched its onboarding suite of technologies in 2007 to cater to enterprise clients’ talent acquisition needs.

What are some of the challenges existing in the HR technology space and how does Cisive address these shortcomings?

In today’s highly regulated environment and technology-driven landscape, employers are competing for top talent more than ever. As a result, they must focus on providing the best candidate experience, which normally means balancing compliance and due diligence with efficiency. Efficient processes that leverage the latest technology can determine whether an employer meets their hiring goals. With Cisive’s technology, employers can have both without compromise.

With Cisive, you will not only get a background screening partner, but a lifelong partner—a company that stands by their work, protects their clients, and provides the consultation and guidance world class organizations are looking for. It is for these reasons that many of our clients have been with us for over 30 years. Cisive’s quality of service, robust reporting, cost-effectiveness, and state of the art—100 percent configurable, proprietary technology sets us apart from all others in the industry.

How Cisive is leading the HR Technology industry by fusing technology and human insight into clear and actionable intelligence?

Governed by a mission to mitigate risk for employers, Cisive empowers clients with actionable intelligence and clarity throughout the hiring processes. The uniqueness of Cisive’s pre-employment screening services stems from our unwavering focus on truthful reporting, legal compliance, and integrity of source material. The company draws on its rich experience to offer the right solutions to enterprise organizations in highly regulated industries such as financial services.

Cisive employs technology to automate processes where achievable by technology, but also employs highly trained personnel for review of background investigation information at critical points.

This approach provides our clients unparalleled insight and the most accurate information and ensures that they overcome employment background check challenges and bring the most qualified candidates on board. Our accuracy rates are extremely high, and our dispute rates are very low. Moreover, while providing this best-in-class quality, our turnaround times compare favourably to our competitors. All these operational and background screening capabilities work in cohesion to improve the candidate experience. We don’t cut corners; as a result, clients don’t have to make a choice between technology and quality of the background screening with Cisive.

Please shed some light about the key features and functionalities of Cisive’s solutions for HR Technology.

Cisive’s onboarding solution provides a real-time view into the status of current and past background checks and drug testing. The configurable dashboard easily manages tasks associated with the new-hire process. The intuitive applicant portal gives applicants an easy screening experience by guiding them through each step of the process. The portal features progress bars, an easy-to-read menu, on-screen text messaging, live chats, and phone and email contact options to help candidates complete the process smoothly.

The system also carries forward data, eliminates duplicate data entry, and provides a faster, more efficient applicant experience.

What according to you are Cisive’s key differentiating factors?

We incorporate statutory and regulatory considerations, benchmarking, best practices, company culture, and hiring risk levels to ensure the best background screening program in the industry. Whether for healthcare compliance, financial service compliance, or general HR compliance, Cisive has never had a judgment filed against it for violations of the FCRA or any other consumer reporting statute or regulation. Our driving mission is to provide the most accurate, reliable risk mitigation services to keep our clients out of harm’s way.

There are a few more prominent companies in our industry, but none better. We have set the standards in our industry for 40 years. Companies in our industry use us as the gold standard of comparison. They may sell against us by maximizing things we don’t such as low price or turn-around time performance, but they know where the high mark for quality and applicant experience is set and by whom. We maintain the same approach to quality today despite the radical changes in technology that have happened over 40 years and despite other background screening companies coming on the scene and taking shortcuts.

What are some of the key advancements planned, geographic expansions thought out, or technological milestones set aside by Cisive?

More than 15 percent of our throughput is international work today. In the last two years, we took our global background screening capability to the next level by acquiring the Pre-Employment Screening division of Blue Umbrella, a well-known and highly regarded background screening and due-diligence company in the APAC region and PreCheck, the pre-eminent background screening company in the healthcare vertical, adding to our presence in transportation with DriverIQ, and railroad and vendor screening with eVerifile. These were major milestones in Cisive’s strategy to provide true, global background screening capabilities for every regulated vertical. We are now the top choice for Fortune 1000 companies in highly regulated industries.

I think the human capital landscape is going to continue to change over the next few years. We will be at the forefront. We are going to continue to develop leading-edge technology as the approach to talent acquisition and management continues to evolve. The nature of background screening is going to undergo a revolution in the next few years due to advances in technologies such as distributed ledgers (blockchain) and this will change the business models for background screening companies. We are seizing on that opportunity and will be out in front!