How Care organisations can make Right-to-Work checks easier

1 - What are the new guidelines for Right-to-Work checks?
2 - What is IVT?
3 - How can care organisations speed up the Right-to-Work process?
4 - DBS and Right-to-Work integration with your ATS

Towards the end of 2022, Right-to-Work checks changed, and hiring in the care sector changed with it.

The rules were originally quite simple. Regardless of remote working, all employers had to physically see and take a copy of each new hire’s passport or working visa documentation. These documents then had to be kept on file for auditing purposes.

The Home Office then implemented new rules following the COVID-19 pandemic. Checks could be performed remotely, mainly via video call. However that too, has since changed.

What are the new guidelines for Right-to-Work checks?

It’s recommended that Right-to-Work checks be carried out by specialist organisations that is a certified IVT – short for Identification Verification Technology. This might sound like Right-to-Work checks have become overcomplicated, but in fact it makes onboarding new care workers easier than ever!

What is IVT?

Identification Verification Technology (IVT) lets a candidate upload a copy of their passport. They effectively take a “biometric selfie." This is then checked using AI. The AI can detect any signs of tampering and also checks the machine-readable data in the passport chip to ensure it’s accurate.

An IVT check completes a face-match with the person that’s uploaded it too to make sure that passport belongs to the same person.

Using AI removes the risk of human error. Often passports (and the photo) could be a number of years old and sometimes a little help from AI could be vital in ensuring it’s checked properly.

Don’t worry though, there is often still a human step. Through the UK's leading Digital Right to Work provider, Yoti and their platform, the human step is to double-check the AI’s calculations. Thus, providing assurance that the employer is being compliant. This service gives you something called “a statutory excuse”.

So, what’s a statutory excuse? It’s an employer’s defence against a civil penalty if an employee is found to be working illegally. An IVT provider will give you all of the evidence, including a breakdown of which checks were made, so you are legally secure if something is later revealed.

How can care organisations speed up the Right-to-Work process?

The quick answer is you can integrate DBS and Right-to-Work checks directly into your ATS.

We spoke to one of our care clients – Grandir – about their plans for DBS and Right-to-Work checking, and they’re looking to our applicant tracking system to make the process quicker, easier, and more efficient.

“Currently we use First Advantage/Know Your People for DBS checks and there are numerous steps involved.” Beth Kennedy – HR Compliance Manager – told us.

“We start an application, add the candidate’s details, then send that off via email to the candidate. Once completed, it’s passed back to us to be verified, then we send it off to the police and all the national records. There are lots of steps involved!

When we go live with Jobtrain, we’re looking forward to using both DBS and Right-to-Work checks that are fully integrated into the ATS to help speed up the process and reduce the amount of time we spend on admin.

Our ideal time-to-hire is 4 weeks. Sometimes it’s quicker than that, sometimes it’s longer but we’re excited to see the difference Jobtrain will make because it will help us reduce the number of steps and establish a defined process!”

DBS and Right-to-Work integration with your ATS

If you currently have an applicant tracking system for your hiring, make sure to ask your supplier if they integrate with any Identification Verification Technology. As an ATS provider, Jobtrain has partnered with Yoti - a certified IVT company – to integrate directly with our platform. We discussed this at length during our webinar on Right-to-Work checks, but in short, here’s how that integration works:

• From Jobtrain, you invite a prospective new-hire to complete a Right-to-Work check.
• An email will automatically send from your ATS to invite a candidate to undertake the check.
• The candidate then goes through the verification process with their passport and taking images of their face.
• Those checks are instantaneous unless some human intervention is required.
• Yoti then automatically notifies you through the Jobtrain ATS whether or not a Right-to-Work check has passed. So you and the candidate can take the appropriate next steps.
• If you or the candidate has any problems – our UK support team is on hand to help!