As the Director of Corporate Solutions at ESS, I serve as a project manager for a variety of areas, one of which is integrations. When I say “integrations,” I’m referring to the service that we offer our clients to integrate with an existing applicant tracking system to streamline a process and make things more efficient. My goal is to help make a client’s existing process better and more efficient so that we can free their employees up to be able to go and do something more effective for their organization.

Integrations seem kind of confusing on the surface, but it’s actually all about connecting two systems in order to make things easier. Most of our clients use some sort of applicant tracking system (ATS) which allows someone to go online, submit a resume and apply for a job.  In doing that, the information they share is housed within that ATS platform.  Depending on the ATS a company uses, that candidate essentially creates a profile that will follow them throughout the whole interview process and the screening process if they get selected for a position. This is where things can get complicated: clients who use an ATS have to take information from that system and bring it to us directly in order to place an order for a background check, drug screening, etc. Once the order is completed on our end, we deliver that information to the client and then they have to go back and enter it into the ATS to move their candidate forward in the process. Integrations improve the process by connecting the two systems for the client.

I’ve been at ESS for about five years, and I love what I do. I’ve always had a knack for understanding systems, processes, and workflows. I genuinely enjoy trying to find ways to improve a process and make it more efficient. My role allows me to evaluate projects that I manage and then provide an effective solution for us both internally and also for our clients. That’s really where the need for integration is born: out of the need for making a process more efficient.  For some clients, it’s reducing overhead by one full-time person who has to do data entry. It also helps streamline and bring consistency and compliance to the ordering process because through leveraging the existing technology, you are dictating that it will be the same background check every time that it is ordered. Which is not to say that technology can’t make errors—but ultimately, we are trying to bring efficiencies to a process, and the implementation of technology helps make that goal possible.