Employment Background Investigations (EBI) - Business Development Achievement of the Year

Company: Employment Background Investigations Inc., ( EBI ), Owings Mills, MD
Company Description: EBI is one of the largest privately held screening firms in the USA, providing background screening, drug testing, occupational healthcare and Form I-9/E-Verify services. A founding member of the National Association of Professional Background Screeners, EBI holds ISO certifications for both Quality Management and Information Security, and is routinely named a top screening provider.
Nomination Category: Business Development Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Business Development Achievement of the Year - Services Industries

Nomination Title: New Partner Alliance Team Makes Partnerships Primary Revenue Driver

Tell the story about this organization's business development achievements since the beginning of July 2017 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

EBI competes with hundreds of other Consumer Reporting Agencies throughout the United States.Over the last one and a halfyears, EBI has developed a partner eco-system to identify, nurture and close indirect opportunities leveraging strategic software and solution providers.

The competition for qualified labor is increasingly intense. To improve talent acquisition and onboarding programs, organizational utilization of Human Capital Management (HCM) technologies has increased dramatically. These tools help identify candidates and expedite the recruiting, offer and onboarding process – all critical to time and cost to fill positions. EBI recognized these solution providers and their customers significantly benefit from streamlined processing of candidates, and the EBI background screening solution was a critical “spoke” in that wheel. Integration with solution providers has existed for many years, but the EBI approach was to take the relationship from a transaction to a true partnership.

The background screening step in the candidate hiring process assimilates best with the Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) solution. These solutions help recruiters identify candidates and interact with them to submit credentials, control evaluation and verify credentials.

EBI hired a Vice President with extensive ATS and HCM solution experience and staffed a Partner Alliance Team. The goal was to establish true partnerships with ATS and HCM providers. These partnerships were based on:

1) EBI’s ability to deliver a quality, integrated product;
2) Rapid integration models with sophisticated yet simple API’s; and
3) Marketing support programs and sales force adoption.

To accomplish the first goal, the Partner Alliance team engaged with our targeted partners’ product teams to fully understand their integration framework and workflow capabilities. Our sales team worked to understand our shared customers’ needs so we were able to present the value of an integrated offering. EBI’s comprehensive audit programs, ISO certifications, support and client testimonials helped us prove our worth to our partners and their customers.

In today’s market, being able to rapidly develop and deliver integrated solutions is a key component to the success of any partner program, hence goal #2. As a key provider to our partner ecosystem, we had to prove our background screening solution could be delivered seamlessly through the ATS, either with our own comprehensive APIs and integration protocol, or through the partners’ APIs. EBI’s process included gaining specific knowledge of how each targeted ATS partner’s technology worked with respect to data, the candidate interaction and the employer interaction. It was critical to demonstrate our ability to meet delivery milestones and to leverage the full feature set of the ATS solution. These API’s, and our ability to deliver a standardized integration and delivery approach for each partner, created an additional layer of confidence in the EBI program.

The third goal was to gain the marketing support and adoption of EBI as the preferred solution of our targeted ATS partners’ sales teams. To achieve this objective, EBI worked with each partner to develop an extensive marketing program, including webinars, conference sponsorships, SHRM programs, case studies and testimonials. We also marketed the integrated solution internally to our partner delivery teams and support teams. Through all this, we achieved adoption and support of the EBI integrated solutions throughout our partner organization.

The EBI Partner Alliance program started one and a halfyears ago with no partnerships and no revenue influence. As we closed out 2018, EBI had over 30 ATS partnerships/integrations, and the amount of new business revenue brought in through these partnerships has jumped from $0.28 per $1.00 to $0.81. And it was done in a year of 38% growth.

2018 proved to be a year in which an innovative concept became the primary driver of our new business growth – yielding millions of dollars and capital to reinvest in our next generation of innovative technologies and strategies, which in turn will open new indirect channels of revenue for EBI