Manufacturing
Centralized Background Reporting System Improves Productivity, Enhances Safety at Owens Corning
The burden of storing, accessing and disseminating employee information within a large corporation can sometimes be daunting. But when you work for Owens Corning and oversee hiring for 150 individual business units throughout the United States and Canada, coordinating background checks for 200 new hires each month can seem downright impossible.
Kelly Snyder is well aware of this predicament. As Staffing Associate working alongside a team of corporate recruiters at the Toledo headquarters of this Fortune 500 company, Snyder is barraged daily with screening requests from Owens Corning’s human resource offices nationwide.
And with such a large amount of requests coming in every day, Snyder’s primary objective is to ensure that hiring snags do not interfere with production or productivity.
“The need for quick turnaround time on background checks is critical in a manufacturing environment,” Snyder comments. “Not only do unfilled positions result in production slowdowns, but a full complement of workers enhances safety and workplace morale. That’s why we stress fast turnaround on investigations after a job offer has been prepared.”
“With such a large organization, many hiring decisions need to be made without delay,” she points out. “We simply can’t stop the manufacturing process while waiting for background information to arrive.”
Many Vendors Impede Progress
Snyder explains how Owens Corning previously handled employee background checks, using “local, across-the-street vendors” to provide information. “Turnaround time was all over the board,” she says. “There was no retention of data in one place and no centralized system to access reports.”
“We opted to streamline the process by bidding out the entire screening operation,” She continues. “We chose Corporate Screening frankly because of the overall readability and comprehensiveness of their reports. We can easily access reports online, the ‘Alert’ icons are easily identified and every report contains a summary page telling us where to look in the document for important information. The alerts greatly help our people in the field pay closer attention to data that needs follow-up.”
While the alert icons on the Corporate Screening reports have proven useful to Snyder’s staff, accessibility has turned out to be an added benefit. “Access to one company for our staff – one consistent vendor and one centralized location for information – makes the whole screening operation much more efficient,” she says.
Tailored Systems to Enhance Productivity
Owens Corning utilizes a company-wide intranet system that its hiring staff uses to access Corporate Screening reports (via linked pages to the CSS EASE online reporting engine).
“Corporate Screening has been very responsive to our needs,” comments Snyder. “They’ve virtually changed their processes to be more in line with our systems, even going to the extent of providing separate invoicing for each of our individual offices nationwide. I’m not so sure other firms would do that.”
“We’re extremely comfortable with the accuracy of the background data we’re receiving and the consistency with which we’re receiving it,” she continues. “Our Corporate Screening account reps provide immediate response to our inquiries, even making that extra phone call to inquire about such mundane things as a social security number that’s out of the ordinary.”
“And that’s what we consider going above and beyond the call.”