James Cisive

Founded in 1977, today Cisive is a global provider of compliance-driven human capital management and risk management solutions. The company’s core objectives include onboarding and pre-employment background screening, offering clients a streamlined, high quality, and regulatory compliant solution. Cisive’s other comprehensive services include vendor/contractor screening, executive screening, drug testing, fingerprinting, paperless onboarding, and electronic Form I-9/E-Verify solutions.

The company is an expert in the specific risks and regulations that apply to the financial services and other highly regulated industries. In 2017, Cisive was rebranded from CARCO Group Inc. to keep pace with its incredible growth and its clients’ increasingly complex challenges for accurate information and insights to make confident decisions.

With over 40 years of background screening experience, the company provides tailored solutions to meet the unique requirements of its enterprise clients. Cisive launched its onboarding suite of technologies in 2007 to cater to enterprise clients’ talent acquisition needs and has been enhancing the platform ever since.

Today, Cisive provides comprehensive global background investigations on potential and current employees, vendors, clients, and business partners. Additionally, the company administers drug testing and fingerprinting services through alliance partners.

Journey through Excellence

At Cisive, the team shares a joint mission of mitigating risk for employers. The company empowers clients with actionable intelligence and clarity throughout the hiring process. The uniqueness of Cisive’s pre-employment screening services stems from their unwavering focus on truthful reporting, legal compliance, and integrity of source material. The company draws on its rich experience to offer the right solutions to enterprise organizations in highly regulated industries such as financial services.

Cisive employs technology to automate processes when needed and recruits highly trained personnel to review background investigation information at critical points. This approach provides its clients unparalleled insight and the most accurate information while ensuring that they overcome employment background check challenges and bring the most qualified candidates on board.

Cisive’s accuracy rates are extremely high, and its dispute rates are very low. Moreover, while providing this best-in-class quality, the company’s turnaround times compare favorably to its competitors. All these operational and background screening capabilities work in cohesion to improve the candidate’s experience. Cisive doesn’t cut corners; as a result, clients don’t have to choose between technology and quality of the background screening with the company.

A Transformational Leader

James Owens, the CEO of Cisive, has transformed the company into an HR technology-enabled services firm. He strives to achieve HR onboarding and background screening at industry-leading quality levels. Before joining Cisive, James was a Senior Architect at Cap Gemini Ernst and Young (CGEY). He has also designed and implemented large-scale systems, which includes several innovative web-based applications.

Delivering Enhanced Solutions through Innovation

Cisive has a string of innovations and applications under its name. These applications target to assuage real-world problems.

In April 2020, the company released SAFE19, a COVID-19 Clearinghouse solution, developed to address the world’s journey to re-open after the Coronavirus global pandemic. This solution is a secure, paperless, central repository specifically designed to handle the uploading, validation, and compliance reporting on the COVID-19 test and immunization data. With SAFE19, governments, businesses, and educational institutions can safely re-open while controlling the spread of COVID-19. It is a flexible, data-driven solution designed to mitigate the risk of COVID-19 with the capability to evolve as vaccines and various testing options become available. The system uses an individual’s profile data and immunization status to generate a digital or physical badge to verify their immunity.

In May 2020, Cisive announced its CONTACT19 contact tracing solution, designed to allow employers to take a proactive approach to test and contact tracing to ensure the safety of their workforce. The program encourages employees to self-report if they experience COVID-19 symptoms or test positive. Also, they can notify other employees who may have been in proximity, making recommendations for isolation or quarantine.

In June 2020, the company released its ACCESS19 solution, completing its suite of COVID-19 compliance solutions. ACCESS19 is a secure, paperless, safety solution specifically designed to allow businesses to resume day-to-day operations while keeping their workforce safe from COVID-19. It eliminates paper documentation and COVID-19 attestation processes for businesses by enabling them to complete the entire procedure from a secure, mobile device. ACCESS19 also provides digital attestation badges that are valid for one day, thus minimizing the risk of Coronavirus by enforcing daily attestation procedures.

Meeting Industry Demands with Disruptive Technologies

The global COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way the world operates. As a result, Cisive has risen to the occasion to develop innovative solutions that address the world’s critical business needs amid the new challenges presented by the pandemic. In a digital-first world, companies are relying on technology more than ever to conduct business. That’s why solutions like Cisive’s SAFE19 COVID-19 Clearinghouse repository were developed to help businesses re-open safely during the pandemic.

Recently, Cisive has joined 14 leading enterprise multinational labor market organizations to launch the Velocity Network Foundation (VNF). This is a collaborative, vendor-neutral, nonprofit organization established to define, deploy, and champion the Velocity Network: a globally accessible, trustworthy “Internet of Careers” powered by innovative blockchain technology in response to growing data privacy, security, and market pressures.

As Artificial Intelligence in HR gets smarter and more focused on solving specific problems, James Owens says, we all expect to see even further capabilities: smart matching of individuals and career opportunities, predictive analytics, and smart people development recommendations.

Trusted Partnerships for Enhanced Service Offerings 

Cisive has collaborated across its division of brands, as well as its partner, SentryMD, to develop its suite of COVID-19 compliance solutions. This partnership was key in the development of SAFE19, which was specifically designed to help re-open communities safely and securely while controlling the spread of the Coronavirus.

For CONTACT19, Cisive utilized the Johns Hopkins University’s COVID-19 contact tracing program to prepare its team for this new service offering. Moreover, for ACCESS19, the company collaborated with its subsidiary eVerifile, whose eRailSafe solution was already the standard for contractor safety and security management for railroads and the vendors that serve them.

Addressing Potential Digital World Challenges

According to James Owens, Human Capital Management, or HCM, is about the active acquisition, employment, and development of a company’s employees through strategic and tactical practices, processes, and applications that maximize their economic value. The set of HCM practices, procedures, and applications should be focused on the organizational need to provide specific competencies.

Apart from this, he thinks that companies must have risk management as a preparation strategy to lessen the effects of threats faced by a data center. In comparison to risk reduction, risk mitigation must take steps to reduce the adverse impact of threats and disasters on Business Continuity (BC). In the current regulated environment and technology-driven landscape, employers are competing for top talent more than ever as the Coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the digital-first world. Therefore, they must focus on the provision of the best candidate experience, which usually means balancing compliance and due diligence with efficiency.

Efficient processes that leverage the latest technology can determine whether an employer meets their hiring goals. With Cisive’s technology, employers can have both without compromise.

Admirable Business Achievements

Cisive has been accredited by the Professional Background Screeners Association (PBSA) and was named for the third consecutive year by HRO Today to the 2019 Baker’s Dozen Customer Satisfaction rankings of Top Pre-Employment Screening Providers. Further, the company has earned Company of the Year by CIO Review and Best Solution Provider of the Year by CEO Views.

Recently, Cisive and its healthcare-focused division, PreCheck, have been named in HR Tech Outlook’s Top 10 Pre-Employment Screening Consulting/Services Companies 2020 list.

Insights into a Promising Future

At present, more than 15 percent of Cisive’s throughput is international. In 2019, the company acquired the Pre-Employment Screening division of Blue Umbrella (now Cisive Global). Cisive Global is now popularly and highly regarded for background screening and leads as a due-diligence company in the APAC region. PreCheck, the pre-eminent background screening company in the healthcare vertical, adds to Cisive’s presence in transportation with DriverIQ, and railroad and vendor screening with eVerifile. These were significant milestones in the company’s strategy to provide accurate, global background screening capabilities for every regulated vertical. 

Today, Cisive is the top choice for Fortune 1000 companies in highly regulated industries.

The company believes the human capital landscape is going to continue to change over the next few years, a change that has been accelerated by the Coronavirus global pandemic. Cisive is already at the forefront. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company has developed three solutions, SAFE19, CONTACT19, and ACCESS19, each designed to work together to help businesses and organizations safely re-open during the ongoing crisis.

Cisive will continue to develop leading-edge technology as the approach to talent acquisition and management continues to evolve. The nature of background screening is going to undergo a revolution in the next few years due to advances in technologies such as distributed ledgers (blockchain), and this will change the business models for background screening companies. Cisive is seizing on that opportunity and will be out in front.