Originally, employee onboarding programs were created to increase employee engagement, cut down ramp-up times and create a smooth transition – all resulting in reduced employee turnover. In a famous study by Brandon Hall Group, it was found that a strong onboarding process improved new hire retention by 82%. 

But in today’s world, an effective employee onboarding program could also be one of the cornerstones in fortifying your security and warding off attackers trying to breach your organization. 

Challenges in employee onboarding

However, there are three major problems currently plaguing organizations when it comes to employee onboarding:

Problem 1: Our background checks need to be better.

According to data from HirePro, there has been a 92% increase in candidate fraud since the pandemic. This has been amplified with the advent of remote working. Yet, the answer cannot be to scrap this model and go back to the previous norms. Remote working, along with the emergence of the gig economy, has placed less focus on proximity and more emphasis on talent. There is big merit in that approach for your organization’s growth.

Instead, the answer is to have a reliable background check process. Unfortunately, name-based checks are dependent on personal information, and that cannot be accurate if the candidate in question has a common name. To give you some context, the state of Gujarat itself has over 300,000 different women named Gita Ben.

Problem 2: Our handling of sensitive data during onboarding has to be better.

Mishandling has become commonplace, with critical personal information often shared, photocopied and transmitted without proper protection or destruction. Moreover, the wide use of name-based checks leaves records prone to alterations, misspellings and other errors. This is making it hard to ensure credibility and proving very costly in terms of compliance fines. 

There could be something deeper to this, as StrongDM’s The Year of Access 2022 Report states that 47% of companies struggle with onboarding employees due to infrastructure challenges. 

Problem 3: Our means of giving organizational access to employees has to be better.

Seamless onboarding is linked to appropriate system access. If there is a disconnect between the onboarding HR team and the IT team, it could inadvertently lead to access being permitted to sensitive information and systems for employees that don’t require it for their tasks. Additionally, when said employees leave the organization, swift & secure account terminations are essential for protecting your sensitive data. Ex-employees should have no access whatsoever to your systems.

In all this talk about access, there is a big elephant in the room: passwords. They are still the primary mode for granting access, and they are becoming increasingly vulnerable. In a recent survey by Yubico, 39% of respondents admitted to reusing passwords. Here’s another knock on effect you may not have thought about: passwords lead to loss in productivity. According to another survey by Yubico, employees spend an average of 10.9 hours entering or resetting passwords every year, and that comes up to a $5.2 million average loss.

The role of biometric verification in streamlining processes

These are pressing problems, but we at iValue-1Kosmos have a solution that can not only streamline your employee onboarding, but also fortify your security against current and emerging threats. At the crux of our onboarding solutions is biometrics, and it provides a compelling answer to all the 3 aforementioned problems:

Solution to Problem 1: While name-based checks rely on potentially overlapping personal information, biometrics relies on unique physical and behavioral characteristics.

Every person on Earth has a unique face, a unique set of fingerprints and unique hand geometry. Moreover, in a country like India, whose primary identification (AADHAAR) has biometrics as the driver, biometric verification onboarding can lead to highly accurate background checks. This is valuable in situations where it is not possible for the potential candidate to visit your office, yet they are of such high caliber that you can’t afford to let them get away.

Solution to Problem 2: There is significantly less chance of error with biometrics in comparison to form filling and physical identity verification.

Biometrics help overcome common onboarding pitfalls like delays, lack of process and information overload by providing quick, highly accurate authentication and information capture. This accuracy helps your organization in adhering to all the myriad compliance requirements with regards to personal information. 

Solution to Problem 3: Biometrics facilitate the transition from risky passwords to secure passwordless architectures.

The great thing about biometrics is that they’re easily adoptable – most smartphones have sensors or cameras available to verify biometrics, with no special hardware required. The other great thing about biometrics is their speed. All that time spent logging in and resetting passwords is dramatically cut. Employees can now login quickly and begin work faster, while undergoing those processes in a far more secure manner.

Despite our constant endorsement, incorporating biometrics does have its set of challenges. Without proper implementation, they can be spoofed or stolen. Moreover, there are ethical & security dilemmas when it comes to storing biometrics in a centralized server. 

1Kosmos solutions for efficient and secure onboarding

Our solution in partnership with industry leaders 1Kosmos conquers these challenges through our process of biometric encryption:

• During the enrollment process, the candidate gives their biometric sample, and that is bound to their subsequently created digital key.
• The key is then encrypted using the biometric itself but cannot be reversed back into either the key or the original biometric. Public key cryptography is used here, where the public key resides within a distributed ledger in our private blockchain and the private decryption key is the real-time sample a user provides during login.
• This distributed ledger, using machine learning algorithms, renders the biometric data completely unintelligible to attackers, while being readily searchable. This allows data to be decentralized away from the reach of attackers, and empowers employees to use biometric authentication without disclosing any private biological data,
• Once verification is done, seamless linkage to your IAM systems provides relevant access to your employees. Incorporating a zero trust model is critical here.

This is at the heart of BlockID, a solution coming out of the iValue-1Kosmos partnership, that transforms employee onboarding through its various benefits:

• Privacy: The decentralized distributed ledger we incorporate removed any need to store biometrics in a server, making it far less prone to breaches.
• Security: Biometrics are far more reliable for secure onboarding than passwords.
• Reliability: Background checks are now highly accurate because of a movement away from name-based checks to verification of unique biological characteristics. This ensures that the user trying to authenticate is the same user that enrolled.
• Speed: Without the need to remember passwords, biometrics provide faster & more reliable access to secure authentication.

So if you’re looking to transform this critical component of your business, learn how 1Kosmos can streamline your employee onboarding process.