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Written By ESR News Blog Editor Thomas Ahearn
Attorney Lester Rosen, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Employment Screening Resources® (ESR), participated in the Marketplace Risk Masters Program that included the webinar “Why Background Checks are More than Just an Added Cost – Moving Towards Building Trust in the Trust Economy” that he presented in May 2020 and the podcast “Background Checks and Beyond” where he was interviewed from June 2020.
Rosen’s webinar and podcast are among the numerous presentations from leading experts in the Marketplace Risk Masters Program from Marketplace Risk. The programming – which is available at no cost for people who sign up by April 30, 2021 – is the leading source of information and education for professionals involved in the “trust economy” or “gig economy.” To learn more, visit www.marketplacerisk.com/mastersprogram.
Background checks are essential to building trust in the “trust economy.” However, the term background check is nearly meaningless since it can encompass such a wide range of activities. The 45-minute webinar with Rosen explored why some background checks may be nearly worthless and why the trust economy marketplace may want to consider national standards to regulate what is covered and how the background checks are performed.
Learning objectives of the webinar included helping trust economy firms learn how to leverage background checks to inspire consumer trust and confidence in order to grow their business, requiring disruptive thinking about the role of background checks in the trust economy, and overcoming the inherent structural barriers to increase trust in the long run despite the fact they may create friction, delay, and expense in the short run.
Rosen also participated in a 32-minute podcast to talk about background screening for the “gig economy.” He talked to the host, Else Tucker, about how the gig economy can bring total strangers together to interact with benefits and risks. Tucker asked Rosen if there would ever be risk-free transactions, what made certain transactions riskier, and what part technology could play in building trust on both sides, among other things.
“The reason that trust is so critical in my area of focus is that, for the most part, gig or platform firms are using people to provide its services and those people are often being provided in a very unique way,” Rosen explained to Tucker. “The essential element of the gig or platform economy for a lot of firms is that total strangers come face to face with you and there are situations created where create deal of havoc could be caused if that goes wrong.”
In an article he wrote titled “Why Consumers Cannot Trust the Trust Economy – The Inherent Conflict of Interest between Gig Economy Firms and their Customers and How to Fix It” that is posted on LinkedIn Pulse, Rosen explained that the basic problem for the trust economy or gig economy – where applications or “apps” are used to facilitate on-demand services for consumers from relative strangers – is, simply put, trust.
“As the trust economy grows, stories of consumers being harmed by criminal acts of providers can be expected to increase as well. Given the negative fallout from such publicity to any firm in the trust marketplace space, it would seem that an effort to create some standardized and generally accepted background screening protocols would be of great benefit to both providers and consumers,” Rosen wrote in the article.
“The obvious solution is for firms in the trust economy to formulate a nationally accepted standardized approach to due diligence and background checks. The keywords are ‘nationally accepted.’ Merely creating self-serving industry standards that benefit the gig marketplace will not go nearly far enough to assure consumers, the government, or plaintiff’s lawyers that the sector is truly regulating itself,” he concluded.
Rosen was the chairperson of the steering committee that founded the Professional Background Screening Association (PBSA), formerly known as the National Association of Professional Background Screeners (NAPBS), in 2003. He was awarded the PBSA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. Rosen was also named a 2020 HRO Today Magazine HR Superstar for his transformational work in Human Resources as a screening leader.
Founded by Rosen in the San Francisco, California area in 1997, Employment Screening Resources® (ESR) – which is accredited by the PBSA and was named the number one pre-employment background screening firm in 2020 by HRO Today – provides state of the art technology that helps gig economy firms perform background checks on the fast growing extended workforce. To learn more about ESR, visit www.esrcheck.com.
NOTE: Employment Screening Resources® (ESR) does not provide or offer legal services or legal advice of any kind or nature. Any information on this website is for educational purposes only.
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