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Improving Aldi’s background screening to streamline recruitment

Key Outcomes

  • Aldi now has a centralised, efficient background screening process
  • The streamlined system has reduced the admin burden for recruiters
  • Candidates now have a better experience and are in post quicker

Challenge

Recruitment of new staff took too long due to inefficient background screening processes. 

Verifile first began providing background screening services to Aldi in 2007. Back then, background checks were ordered by individual business units, with no single, consistent approach or process deployed across them all.

Fast forward to now and the arrangement looks very different, with a centralised contract in place for background screening and with processes driving greater efficiencies.

The act of improving how the process works has left Aldi with a more consistent approach to its background screening and a far clearer picture of national processes.

Kelly Stokes, Aldi HR Director, explained, “The inefficiencies of the previous approach we adopted to background screening had created a significant administrative burden for our recruiters.

“It was also increasing the time it took to hire people – and it also meant that our central HR function had insufficient oversight of what was happening at a national level.

“We’re always looking to see where we can perform better, so it made sense to investigate how we could improve this situation.”

Solution

Verifile streamlined and automated the screening process to create a consistent, cost-effective, centralised approach. 

Aldi’s HR team started looking into automating and centralising its background screening. Keen to understand what options the market could offer, the tender for a new, centralised contract was issued.

Despite being the incumbent provider, it was a process Verifile were happy to embrace and even help to scope out, as account manager Rachel Felton explained.

“The tender represented an ideal opportunity to explore how Aldi could undertake their background screening activities more efficiently, introducing more control and consistency to the process.

“Previously, stores and distribution centers were responsible for managing their own contracts with us, placing new orders, setting up users on the system and paying invoices. Here was the chance to centralise activity, refine processes, save costs and provide a national overview of recruitment screening.”

Verifile duly won the contract, leading to a new screening policy, managed and monitored by the central HR team, being rolled out across the entire UK portfolio of more than 800 stores.

Results

“A unified background screening process delivers consistent background checks, reduces complexity, and improves the candidate experience.”

Individual stores retain the responsibility for their checks, but the central team now have complete oversight of the whole process.

Kelly concluded, “Verifile’s years of working with us as a trusted supplier and partner meant that they understood both our business and the brief we were working towards.

As well as being so diligent with the checks they run for us, the way they communicate with us and report back to us has been excellent.”

Rachel added, “Aldi is a fascinating business to work with; so dynamic and diverse and growing so rapidly.

“What they now have is a model of best practice for an organisation of this size and ambition; a unified screening policy that’s delivering greater consistency, reducing complexity and improving the candidate experience.”

Do you need to streamline your background screening processes? 

We can help. Contact +44 (0) 1234 60 80 90.

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