THE CHALLENGE
Avochato is a San Francisco-based SaaS company that provides text messaging software solutions for sales, support, and operations teams. Like most companies in today’s extremely competitive labor environment, Avochato is in a fierce battle to hire and onboard new employees.As Avochato’s hiring plans accelerated, they increasingly realized that their background check provider was inflexible, outdated, and impersonal. Rather than enhance Avochato’s hiring process, their background check provider regularly slowed it down. It became clear that in order to hit aggressive hiring targets and provide a first class experience to new hires, Avochato needed a screening partner that operates in the same modern way that it does.
Alex De Simone is co-founder and CEO of Avochato. He explains, “Creating excellent customer interactions through modern forms of communication is the heart and soul of what we do at Avochato. It’s essential that we work with a background check company that values contemporary communications, especially at the candidate level since competition for top talent is so fierce.”
Another requirement of De Simone’s was to find a background check provider that would treat his company as a partner, rather than just another order to fill. “We rely on the expertise and passion of our service providers to expand and enhance the capabilities of our staff. We can’t afford for our recruiting team to be slowed down working through outdated processes, and we certainly can’t afford for candidates to get frustrated fulfilling our background check requirements. Also, compliance is incredibly important to us, especially SOC 2 compliance, which involves the security and privacy of customer data.”
Another requirement of De Simone’s was to find a background check provider that would treat his company as a partner, rather than just another order to fill. “We rely on the expertise and passion of our service providers to expand and enhance the capabilities of our staff. We can’t afford for our recruiting team to be slowed down working through outdated processes, and we certainly can’t afford for candidates to get frustrated fulfilling our background check requirements. Also, compliance is incredibly important to us, especially SOC 2 compliance, which involves the security and privacy of customer data.”
As a company whose mission is to improve conversations, Avochato wanted to ensure candidates and new employees experienced great conversations during the onboarding process. “We believe today’s consumers don’t want their conversations with companies limited to call centers and support emails,” De Simone explains. “They want to communicate with the companies they do business with just like they do with family and friends. Text messaging is overwhelmingly their preferred method of communication.”
Enter Good Egg.
THE SOLUTION
Keryn Basl, Manager of Strategic Partnerships at Good Egg, says she and the Good Egg team were excited to work with Avochato and bring their vision to life by incorporating text messaging into multiple areas of the background check process.
“We’re a customer-focused company as well, so we immediately got what Avochato was trying to achieve. We were able to work with Avochato and say, ‘What’s the best overall solution and how can we incorporate text messaging into this overall solution?’ Meaning not just initiating and allowing the candidate to complete the background check via text, but incorporating it into our fulfillment processes, as well.”
John-Paul Barnych, Good Egg’s VP of Sales, agrees that candidate text messaging makes sense and that companies need to embrace modern recruitment and screening methods if they want to remain competitive in a tight labor market.
Text messaging also helps HR when it comes to reaching out to job candidates’ references. Basl says that one of the biggest challenges in the background check industry is the time it takes to verify prior employment and references. Texting has reduced the number of “unable to verify” situations and dramatically lowered the amount of time it takes to fulfill them since people are much more inclined to answer texts right away.
Of course, the human touch is still relevant even as people approach 2020. One of Avochato’s issues with its past provider was the fact job candidates never could reach a live human being.
Barnych says, “What makes Good Egg unique is not only do we have folks right here in our New York office whose only job is to answer the phone when candidates call, but now we make ourselves available via text message. What that means is when a candidate is going through the process of completing their background check, they can send a text to our team and get a real-time response.”
THE RESULTS
Avochato’s CEO Alex De Simone says he and his colleagues are incredibly pleased with the partnership the company has built with Good Egg. “What I love especially,” he says, “is how the entire Good Egg team embraced our vision and created a background check solution that meets all our needs—incredible candidate experience through text messaging, flexibility and customization, SOC 2 compliant, and superior customer service for candidates and HR.”
Below are some of the immediate results Avochato has experienced since choosing Good Egg as its screening partner:
- Enhanced candidate experience through every stage of the background check process, thanks to text messaging
- Faster employment and education verifications
- Faster completion of pre-employment drug tests
- Six-star customer service that’s equal parts responsive and helpful
- Reduced time-to-hire without sacrificing quality
- Helped Avochato get SOC 2 compliant in record time in regards to background checks (critical for enterprise-focused companies)
De Simone adds, “We’re thrilled with the relationship we have with Good Egg, and we’re equally thrilled with the relationships we’re developing with our candidates thanks to Good Egg’s background check solution.”
Ready to talk to Good Egg about adding text messaging to your background screening process?
