Earlier this week I had the opportunity to attend Equifax Workforce Solutions annual user conference in Scottsdale. It was an almost intimate affair with a little more than 200 customers attending – with its great advantages for all attending – like direct access to executives, a lot of networking opportunities and a great opportunity for Equifax customer to look at other Equifax products and offerings. Customers were overall very positive on products and direction, and even more open to exchange experience and best practices, when it comes to compliance HR professionals are (literally) all in the same boat.
Equifax Workforce Solutions (EFX WS) was started with the Equifax acquisition of TALX, which today forms the backbone of the Equifax employment verification business. Coupled with strong offerings in compliance, largely centered on the hiring process and subsequent onboarding, EFX WS helps to automate the hard part of the process with I-9 services, background checks, WOTC data capture, call outs to benefits etc. With employment verification and unemployment insurance validation EFX WS has equally strong offerings in later phases of an employee life cycle. And not surprisingly EFX WS customers are in high turnover and / or industries that show a lot of seasonal hiring (e.g. retailers, food and beverage etc.).
Compliance is the game
As general guidance, EFX WS seems to seek out areas of automation in the HR process landscape that are hard and unpleasant to automate and execute – but enterprises could get in significant trouble if they do not execute and run them well. Hence the headline that EFX WS is like preventive medicine for the HR department – similar as many people take their vitamins and minerals to prevent from disease taking over, EFX WS is happy to be the partner of taking care of all the ugly and hard compliance processes. Enterprises using EFX WS are generally buying automation of a vital, but not strategic service – unless it fails, so basically peace of mind and time to focus on other – often more deemed strategic HR activities.
And beyond Compliance
It was good to see that EFX WS is not resting on its laurels in the compliance area – but also looking at other strategic applications. And there are 2 key areas EFX WS is looking at:
- Analytics – With the acquisition of eThority EFX WS has a strong ETL and BI tool, but is looking at creating (true) analytics now, based on the TALX employment and more data. With over 70% coverage of the FT500 employments on file, there is a very attractive set of data to come up with insights that HR practitioners have been craving for since a long time.
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| An example of bench marking Equifax can provide. |
- Credit – EFX WS sees an opportunity to become a source of credit for consumers. The scenarios goes along the lines that FICO scores of consumers have no recovered (yet) from the last financial crisis, and employment verification (coupled with salary), can be a strong (or good enough) indicator to extend credit to a consumer. The purchase of automotive vehicles is the use case at hand.
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| Value to consumer and merchant of employment verification is obvious in this example. |
MyPOV
This event showed once again the value of small events – great access, experience and best practice exchange. Equifax has a great track record of helping enterprises with the hard things most HR practitioners do not want to spend too much time on. But these things can be mines that enterprises may step on and then the damage could be catastrophic, just consider reputational damage. Moreover Equifax has all the data to its disposal to become a key analytical benchmark provider and information solutions provider, two areas with a lot of appeal and value – both for Equifax and its customers. The credit provider play has probably the most potential, though EFX WS has to overcome the fears of data being shared with its holding company, Equifax the credit bureau.
