Manage Your PEVs From One Screen with A-Suite's Latest Update

AvatarFleet released an upgrade to help you manage your Previous Employment Verifications (PEV). The A-Suite PEV Manager has received some handy upgrades in the most recent release.

You now have the ability to instantly contact candidates to update or correct information in their employment history, as well as some useful automation when information does need to be changed or corrected.

What Is PEV?

Previous Employment Verification represents one of the most arduous and challenging parts of the hiring process in professional driving.

It is the FMCSA mandate that, for each previous employer for the past 3-10 years (depending on the position and previous employment role) an investigation is done on that history with special attention paid to previous FMCSA drug screens.

Why Is PEV Important? 

The specific requirements for this record are quite strict and can be a major time drain on recruiters and safety personnel as they try to acquire this information.

The driver qualification requirements under Section 391 dictate that prior to hiring a driver, you must conduct either a successful verification for each safety-sensitive position in their recent history or a “good faith effort” to make contact with the previous employer.

This can be a real pain in the neck, as not all previous employers respond in a timely manner if they respond at all. FMCSA’s continued emphasis on hard visual evidence often means that even some companies that do the diligence of trying three times fail to provide the evidence of contact and risk failing a DOT audit as a result.

As such, incomplete verifications are frequently flagged during audits and make for an easy target for probation and fines. Or, in waiting for responses from these employers, the 30-day window lapses which means this record will never be compliant - something you do not want to explain on the deposition chair.

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How the PEV Manager Can Help

Even with electronic communication replacing much of the old system of snail mail and faxes, collecting all relevant PEVs can be a real hassle. There’s a reason that many companies simply prefer to outsource the job to their criminal background providers. Depending on the size of your fleet, that can be annoyingly expensive. So what is the alternative?

Leverage Pre-Built Emails 

If you have an already existing Recruit subscription of A-Suite, you can use the PEV Manager to help with this process. Inside of the module, you can easily track contacts and draft template emails to ship out to previous employers quickly and efficiently.

Since candidates sign their consents and provide their employment history as part of existing application workflows, those forms easily attach to outbound messages right in the Manager. Also, it is easy to type in your attempted contacts and have them saved there for as long as needed – no need for sticky notes or scribbled times in a file.

Manage Multiple Verifications at Once

The PEV Manager also allows you to manage several verifications at a time in one place. Using filters, you can move between drivers or groups of drivers to organize your current verifications as you like, as well as add notes or other documentation to each driver’s entry. You can see how all of this works with this step-by-step explanation. 

Additionally, with the new features to the PEV Manager, recruiters can make quick changes to existing paperwork whenever there is an error or something forgotten on an application. Maybe the driver forgot a previous employer or got their dates of employment wrong.

Message Drivers Without Leaving the PEV Manager

Now you can prompt a driver from directly inside the PEV Manager with a message to nudge them to fix something in 30 seconds. Since you’re using an ATS, once they make the changes to their paperwork and resign, those changes will move into the PEV Manager as well.

Best of all, if you find that the previous employers took their sweet time to not respond to your requests for verification, and you ever do need to resend paperwork, there is a quick feature to refresh consent to do so. This will work similarly to the reminder above in that you can shoot off a quick message to the driver to resign their consents and then those can be easily updated.

Previous Employment Verification can be problematic in the amount of time, energy, and money it can cost to remain compliant. You shouldn’t have to choose between hiring a driver you need or following FMCSA regulations. This feature can be immensely helpful with this part of the process and if you are an A-Suite Recruit subscriber – it’s already there waiting for you!