HRTech Interview with Mark Lieberwitz, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at KarmaCheck

Mark Lieberwitz, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at KarmaCheck talks about the latest hiring trends across B2B SaaS and how modern HRTech can instill better end to end talent acquisition and management processes:

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Tell us about yourself and the story behind KarmaCheck.

I’m the chief product officer and one of the co-founders of KarmaCheck, a technology-based solution for background checks, credentialing, and compliance. I have nearly 20 years of product management and sales experience at companies like Resilience, Meltwater, and Charles Schwab.

Part of founding a successful startup is identifying a pain point and coming up with a solution. That’s exactly what my co-founders and I aimed to do with KarmaCheck.

In the background check industry, an update to both the candidate and customer experience has been long overdue. Organizations have historically been unsatisfied with background check vendors due to their lack of technical innovation, difficult-to-use product interfaces with a lack of transparency, and sub-standard customer service. This has created immense stress for both hiring teams looking to fill important positions and job seekers trying to find their ideal roles.

At KarmaCheck, we’ve reduced the tedious, manual work of background checks by making automation that leverages AI integral to our product. This infrastructure simplifies tasks for customers and candidates while expediting the overall process. KarmaCheck offers an intuitive dashboard for administrators that shows where a candidate is in the process, a mobile-first interface for candidates, chat that’s connected directly to our customer experience team, and integrations with a customer’s application tracking system (ATS) or proprietary technology. Listening to our customers showed us that these are the features they need and value in a credentialing platform, and we’ve made all of them an imperative for our solution. I’m incredibly proud that we’ve built a product that is revolutionizing the background check and credentialing processes.

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What are some of the challenges hiring and HR teams face when performing background verification checks?

An overwhelming challenge for hiring and HR teams is the poor overall experience that both customers and candidates encounter. In most instances, when it’s time for a background check, the candidate has signed an offer letter and the recruiting team wants to begin onboarding new talent. But background checks can hinder hiring, resulting in slower processes and delayed start dates.

This is an underreported problem with tangible consequences. The healthcare industry, for example, is severely understaffed, causing more burnout among healthcare workers and leading to issues in quality of care. Traditional background screenings require healthcare employers to use 3-6 vendors, sometimes more, to complete and compile all necessary checks before a candidate can start. Meanwhile, candidates are motivated to start work and receive their first paycheck. In every industry that requires background checks, all of these issues compound into a frustrating user experience, causing candidates to drop out of consideration and, in turn, staffing agencies and recruiters to miss their goals.

For HR teams looking to optimize this process, what tips would you share?

Identify ways to automate manual work and tedious processes. That can involve using new or existing technology in numerous ways, such as templates, pre-filling information, eSignature, digital/photo capture of credentials, integrations, and dedicated software. We’ve doubled down on this approach at KarmaCheck, and it’s proven to be extremely beneficial to our customers.

Second, don’t lose sight of the overall experience you’re building for candidates and your internal team. Consolidate and simplify wherever possible. The experience your candidates receive reflects your company and values, and they will compare it to your competition. More than 75% of candidates complete documentation, forms, and onboarding on mobile devices, so ensure your solutions are optimized for mobile.

What pointers would you share with Hiring teams that are deploying new HRTech and AI backed HRTech solutions to ease the various aspects of these and similar processes?

AI is incredibly valuable to the background check process, greatly increasing efficiency in an industry that’s long overdue for innovation. However, I can’t overemphasize the benefit of human oversight when employing AI-backed HRTech solutions, especially in an industry where accuracy is key. Typically these solutions will result in less work for existing teams, where those folks can be redeployed to more valuable initiatives. Look for those opportunities to maximize ROI.

At KarmaCheck, we’ve hired a team of experienced professionals to ensure the accuracy of results and provide a positive experience for both businesses and candidates. Combining the power of artificial intelligence and human intelligence is key — AI should be seen as an enhancement, not a catch-all solution. Automating manual processes is the name of the game when it comes to implementing AI and technology; the background check industry is no different.

Can you talk about some of the most unique HRTech advances that have piqued your interest from the global HRtech market?

Tracking a candidate’s data from job to job will enable new software products to reuse previously submitted or verified data on candidates. This means a background check process that doesn’t need to re-verify the candidate’s previous job history, completed education, and similar attributes. We can start to track the quality of a candidate’s contributions to jobs over time as well, helping build a stronger candidate profile and enabling hiring managers to make more informed hiring decisions.

A desire for a broader view of the candidate quality is leading organizations to better evaluate how a candidate will likely perform based on past experience, skills assessments administered over time, references, and previous manager reviews. This can close the gap between perceived capability at the start of an assignment or job and their actual historical performance. Software programs and assessment products are gathering new data to enable these types of measurements, where previously employers had to rely on traditional interview processes.

Can you share five thoughts on the future of AI, HR and HRTech?

1. To be successful in adopting AI and benefiting from the technology, employers should look for software products and partners that specialize in using AI within their offerings rather than attempting to harness and train machine learning (LM) models themselves. Employers that find partners who specialize in a particular area use AI to augment their offering and have significant customer data to train their AI models will win over competitors that attempt to build out this technology in-house.
2. Hybrid and remote work will continue to be a driver in HR and HR Tech, making communication technologies and the ability to harness and share data cornerstones of efficient working environments. Choosing the right partners and tools in a remote work world will make the difference between low and high performing teams.
3. Specifically at KarmaCheck, we envision a credential wallet where previously collected candidate information can be used to speed up the data collection, background check, and credentialing process. This credential wallet will bring efficiencies to the market in faster evaluation and placement of candidates, a better user experience for all involved, and cost savings when verified data can be reused.
4. Technology continues to offer efficiencies in simplifying and speeding up workflows and automation of repetitive tasks. This will ultimately enable employers to redeploy current recruiting and credentialing headcount to more valuable HR initiatives. We see this playing out today in the healthcare staffing industry, where adoption of leading tech is enabling teams to be more efficient with far fewer manual processes.
5. HR and credentialing professionals should seek new ways to add value in evaluating and attracting top candidates. This includes recruiting tactics and presenting an attractive brand for candidates, offering the best user experience to candidates as a competitive advantage, and ensuring clean HRIS and candidate data to enable automation for credentials and verifications.

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