Best PracticesDealership Operations & Processes

5 Ways Your Dealership Can Maintain Employee Compliance

Keeping track of constantly changing workforce compliance and regulatory requirements can be costly and time consuming for your dealership’s HR team. Not only does your team have to ensure compliance for employees you already have on staff, but you also need to maintain compliance throughout the hiring process for each new role. If your dealership isn’t compliant every step of the way, it can lead to fines, litigation and other legal action.

Is your dealership maintaining employee compliance starting with the hiring process? We’ve pulled together several key compliance steps to keep in mind.

Conduct Compliant Interviews

Asking the right interview questions help you gain insight into candidates’ personalities, skills and motivations for wanting to work for your dealership, ultimately helping you build your best team. To stay compliant, ask each candidate the same questions to ensure you’re completing fair interviews and evaluating all candidates in the same way.

Besides asking each candidate consistent questions, maintaining employee compliance also means avoiding illegal interview questions. According to employment law, asking candidates questions unrelated to the open role is illegal. These can include questions touching on age, family, gender, marriage, nationality and religion. While they might seem harmless and conversational, asking such questions can lead to legal action and reputation damage at your dealership.

Complete Reference and Background Checks

Candidate screening is a key part of the hiring process because your dealership needs responsible and trustworthy team members. And an often overlooked screening step is completing reference checks, as many hiring managers find it time consuming. By partnering with an integrated hiring and talent management platform, many steps in the reference check process can be automated. Candidates provide their reference contact information and surveys are automatically sent contacts, saving time that would have otherwise been spent scheduling and completing a call.

As part of the automated reference check process, candidates waive liability for damages before the process begins, ensuring your dealership and any contacts avoid litigation. And as an added security measure, IP addresses are collected from each reference and any duplicate addresses – whether from with the candidate or other references – are flagged for fraud.

In addition to reference checks, background checks offer you more assurance that each new hire can be trusted. And this step can also be automated as well – candidates simply submit the required personal information and the rest of the process is taken care of automatically. The platform helps you select the required background checks, obtains candidate authorization, verifies results and manages payment. This results in accurate and timely turnaround of applicant screening results, eliminates errors and ensures each new hire can be fully vetted before you extend an offer.

An accurate background check report will provide peace of mind that each prospective employee has a history free from negligence or other activities that may put your customers – and dealership – at risk. If any red flags show up on a background check – such as a suspended driver’s license for a candidate applying to a role that requires driving – you can instead move forward with another candidate with a clean record.

Initiate Digital Onboarding

Each time you hire a new employee, you need to onboard and educate them on your policies, procedures, rules and regulations. Support a seamless transition between the hiring and onboarding by electronically assigning new hire paperwork immediately after making the hire. With digital onboarding, you can begin the process once a candidate accepts the job offer, by distributing and collecting all necessary documentation, including I-9 and W-4 forms, before day one. This way, new employees don’t have to sit in the HR office the entire first day filling out paperwork and can start contributing to your team right away.

Centralize Employee Data

In addition to increasing productivity, digital onboarding helps your dealership maintain employee compliance by automating manual, error-prone processes and centralizing all new hire paperwork. This enables your dealership to securely store sensitive information and easily access it in the event of an audit or litigation. This is much more streamlined and compliant than alternative options, such as using a variety of systems – emails, spreadsheets and more – to collect and store employee information.

Automate Manual, Error-Prone Processes

Automating compliance in one system reduces risk, lowers the overall cost of compliance and saves time. By automating certain processes – including background and reference checks, onboarding paperwork, employee training schedules, and more – you can avoid common human errors and ensure all employees are up to speed on everything they need, while maintaining compliance. A centralized hiring and talent management system complete with compliance capabilities also enables you to track compliance progress and success. Managers at your dealership can track progress of compliance activities across their team and individual employees with a breakdown of tasks that are past due, not started, in progress or completed. With increased visibility of status, you can direct teams across your dealership to stay on track.

Not only can following these steps help your business maintain employee compliance, but it can lead to a more efficient hiring process, improved time to hire and increased time to productivity for new employees. For more information on how your dealership can stay compliant, visit Hireology.com/compliance.

S
Scott is the Vice President of Product at Hireology, driving the product roadmap for upcoming Hireology features. He's responsible for discovering, de...