The Need for Data Privacy with Human Capital Management

Your company’s HR professionals sit in a unique position within an organization. They’re in contact with a variety of people, both internally and externally. Through human capital management — people resource management practices across workforce acquisition, management, optimization — these professionals deliver tremendous business value in streamlining operations while hiring the right people.   

But there’s a potential data privacy issue: between communicating with new hire candidates, current employees, recruiters, vendors, insurance companies, and other partner organizations, HR professionals are regularly exchanging sensitive information. In many cases, the other party doesn’t need to see 100% of the information on a given file or document.

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Protecting Employee Data

Most employee information, from home addresses to social security numbers, enters the company ecosystem as soon as a prospective employee applies for a position and becomes a core pillar of human capital management. Perhaps more than ever, a strong onboarding process sets the foundation for successful ongoing security and employee peace of mind.     

It’s expensive to onboard new employees—the average cost per hire is about $4,129. A couple of the most significant factors that increase these initial human capital management costs:

• Onboarding paperwork administration. Onboarding paperwork is full of personally identifiable information. Tax forms, benefits enrollment, employee handbooks and agreements—the list goes on and on. While completing these forms digitally saves time, it also introduces a new element of security to manage with more sensitive data on your servers.
• Technology for work. Typically, companies provide employees with technology to help them be productive at work and at home. New laptops and phones are the most common, though some companies may set up hires with hard drives, company credit cards, or even (gulp) virtual private networks. The more avenues for data to exchange hands, the higher the likelihood of a leak. And unfortunately, employees may be a bit more lax with security practices. For example, they might opt for the convenience of a third-party service to share large files, opening an additional door for security risks or leaks.  

Remote and hybrid work has added another wrinkle to the mix. Instead of having a centralized area where all employees work—with IT only a few steps away—everyone is now scattered across the country or the globe.

You may not have any intentionally malicious actors within your company. Still, it’s easy enough for an employee to unwittingly share a file or folder with a colleague that may have confidential or personal identifying information inside it. Ideally, that data would be masked or obfuscated, so people that shouldn’t have access to it don’t give it a second thought, though that’s not always the case.

The pairing of remote work with new and traditional human capital management methods means data security and data privacy have never been more critical. The organizations that aren’t taking the time to focus on protecting sensitive data could quickly get into trouble with compliance regulations or struggle to retain employees. And that focus on protection goes beyond your company walls.

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What About External Candidates?

Let’s face it: Your company won’t hire all of the people it interviews. Even with more job openings than there are people to fill them, candidates and employers don’t always match up. A candidate may lack experience in a specific area, or another prospect might show more leadership potential.  

Unless someone truly flunked the interview process, HR professionals will almost always keep their data within your organization. It can be helpful to know they’ve already talked to someone, and they may like some of what they heard. In some cases, they’ll return to a candidate down the line. Maybe a new position opened up where they’re a better fit, or they may have gained new experience since the last interview.

Whatever the case may be, there’s a file of their information. HR professionals need that data to make calls, share job descriptions, and send email reminders. They might be working with a recruiter, exchanging information with another third party. The data often includes personal phone numbers, home addresses, and potentially social security numbers, and it doesn’t need to be seen by everyone within the company or partner organizations.

Restricting that access in a way that doesn’t slow down the interview process or make your current employees less productive is a must to ensure data privacy for these candidates. If your organization loses a candidate or employee’s trust by inadvertently sharing their private information, it tends to go further than the individual. Word spreads quickly, and suddenly, you’ve gained a reputation as a company that can’t keep the data of its own employees — or potential employees — secure. 

As your company grows, it becomes more critical to ensure both internal and external data is kept secure.

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Stop Sweating the Workday

What if you could create customized access rules to enforce security protocols for everyone, no matter their title or technical savvy? And what if you could do so before any data was displayed, without altering it?

Nullafi’s proprietary software sits between applications and endpoints, using your existing security service edge to mask data across applications. That means no agents, no integrations, or complicated security setups. Just secure data across any number of users, endpoints, and applications, whether they’re the employees inside your organization or the candidates, references, and third parties outside of it.

All you need to do is change a single configuration file to your existing network technology, and our software runs in your environment. There’s no worry about latency, downtime, or third-party data risk. It takes 15 minutes—less time than watching an episode of The Office! 

Ready to transform the data security of your human capital management? Contact us today to get started.