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Looking For a New Health Plan Provider or Employment Verification Vendor?
Looking For a New Health Plan Provider or Employment Verification Vendor?
Warren Buffett has said, “You only have to do very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”
This quote epitomizes the importance of effective decision making and as pointed out in this Expert Choice blog post, the skill requires knowing how to choose the right things to do consistently.
HR departments typically contend with so many different vendor-based service offerings, to support employee needs, that it makes sense to ask the following questions at least annually: 1) Should we change any of our vendor relationships this year? and 2) Are there any functions that we’re currently managing in-house which we should outsource?
Let’s take a look at each of these questions below to see how effective decision making can be applied.
1) Should we change any of our vendor relationships?
Vendors managing services ranging from health and dental plans to employment verification should be routinely evaluated, to ensure that they are strategically aligned with your organization. Many companies take a ‘check the box' approach to evaluating vendors, which typically focuses on singular factors, such as cost.
To optimize decision making, it is recommended that leadership across the organization are involved in determining critical success requirements for vendor relationships and, then, prioritize them accordingly.
This ensures that key constituents from the organization are involved in selecting the best vendor-managed product that suits the organization’s needs. Outside of cost and security, some factors that are commonly considered to be as or more important include, product flexibility (customization), customer service, and ease of implementation and use.
For employment verification, the ability to customize, customer service, and the overall ease of both the implementation and the system all tend to consistently score higher than the cost in organization-based discussions.
2) Are there any functions that we're currently managing in-house which we should outsource?
Organizations commonly struggle with the question of when it’s appropriate to outsource a function or process that’s currently managed in-house. There is rarely a clear answer and certainly not a broad-based one.
Some organizations wait until outsourcing is the only option due to rapid growth or lack of resources, which leads to inefficiency and decreased company morale. To ensure proactivity, ask the following key questions on an annual basis for each in-house managed function:
- What are the prioritized critical success requirements for each of the functions?
- Are all organization-based constituents receiving the expected values from the critical success requirements?
- If we outsource a function, where do we reallocate resources and/or cash from cost savings?
The answers to the tough questions above will make it clear when outsourcing should be reviewed for each product.
For employment verification, companies typically outsource once an active headcount reaches 1,000 employees, and there’s a need to spend more time and money on human resources rather than process administration.
At i2Verify, we’d be happy to help you with your decision-making whether it’s for deciding to utilize our employment and income verification service that’s free for employers, or one of the services offered by our valued partners.