Everyone has applied for or hired someone for a job at some point, and the process can be overwhelming, for both sides. You have to source hundreds of candidates, interview them multiple times, get hiring managers and the extended team on board and negotiate a benefits package. And that’s all before the candidate accepts the offer. Thats where SterlingBackcheck comes into the picture. SterlingBackcheck runs background checks once an employer is ready to give out an offer. Founded in 1972, SterlingBackcheck provides background checks for over 30,000 customers around the world, including a quarter of the Fortune 100. This translates to over 10 million background checks per year and speed is the most important part of their service.
Tableau Helpful, But Not One-Size-Fits-All
Account managers at SterlingBackcheck are responsible for quickly identifying outliers in candidate data so clients can avoid delays and move forward with hiring their candidates. The account managers look at how long it takes a certain region or group to deliver background checks, then drill into why certain regions are falling behind. To help them sift through the data and perform these root-cause analyses, the BI team purchased Tableau, which gave them the ability to aggregate datasets that were too big and cumbersome for Excel.
The BI team discovered that while Tableau offered good business intelligence reporting and data visualization functionalities, it failed to solve their most pressing challenge: providing immediate access to ad-hoc reporting questions from the account managers. Non-technical end users had to rely on the BI team to build their BI reports, leaving them locked out of their data and added to the end of a queue. As a result, the SterlingBackcheck BI team faced an endless bottleneck.
Given the 10 million background checks that we do annually, traditional reporting just doesn’t answer our needs.
- Taylor Culver, AVP Product Management & Data, SterlingBackcheck
Teaming Up with ThoughtSpot
To fix the reporting bottleneck, SterlingBackcheck needed a BI solution that:
Was easy enough for non-technical users
Was flexible enough to answer ad-hoc questions that weren’t pre-defined
Could get up and running quickly
So they turned to ThoughtSpot to complement their existing BI architecture. ThoughtSpot offered the company an opportunity to free up the BI and IT teams and eliminate the reporting bottleneck so that they could focus on higher-level challenges. ThoughtSpot puts the power of data directly into the hands of end users, requires minimal training for business users, and allows them to access instant answers and perform their own ad hoc analysis.
Bringing BI to the Front-Lines
SterlingBackcheck was able to get ThoughtSpot up and running in less than three months. While many business intelligence solutions limit data access to the data experts, ThoughtSpot has opened up data access at SterlingBackcheck across the company so that everyone can get answers in seconds and make smarter, strategic decisions.
Account managers analyze customer activity by product to drill down to the individual customer level so they can identify critical details about each customer account and provide proactive customer service. They can identify that background checks in a certain region or courthouse are taking longer than average, and follow up with the customer to alert them of the delay and come up with ways to speed up the process.
Product managers analyze customer activity by product to identify outliers, perform root-cause analysis, and determine which offerings should be prioritized based on time-to-close and customer feedback.
Finally, data analysts monitor usage, data quality metrics, and data KPIs across all of the organization’s data sources, now easily accessible in a single place, to help them drive adoption of ThoughtSpot within the company.
A Catalyst for Data Innovation
Since implementing ThoughtSpot, adoption across the company has grown tremendously, allowing the business intelligence team to reduce its reporting backlog by 60%. As a result, the access to data is helping the company transition from being a reactive organization to one that proactively solves problems based on the data they now have access to. ThoughtSpot has become a catalyst for innovation in the company.
Want to learn more? Check out the entire SterlingBackcheck story in their on-demand webinar.
