Money Talx….. and You Know the Rest

On Monday I posted an article about the power play (or money grab) that Talx is doing with all its CRA clients and in effect, their end users.  I’m happy to say that the article has received a ton of traction and I have received a lot of comments on the LinkedIn post as well as phone calls and emails from not only Talx clients but also a former Talx employee.  A lot of this is very eye opening and I wanted to use this soapbox to post some of those comments.  Obviously, some things must be redacted, and I have to remove names to protect the innocent, but you get the point. 

What can you do in the meantime?  I think you should start with “liking” “sharing” and “commenting” on my original and this post. (Have your employees do the same) Why? It gets the word out, and the more awareness we have the better opportunity you have to combat this and convince them to make a change! 

See comments below, others can be found under the comments section of my original LinkedIn post.

• Former Talx Employee – I’m a former Equifax/The Work Number employee who was directly involved with TWN CRA customers. I didn’t want to post this publicly but thought it might help in your cause. You are dead on in your assessment, and this is a pure land grab by EFX. I have a lot of contacts and friends in the CRA industry and one of the reasons I left EFX was because of the change in how they treated CRA’s and I no longer wanted my personal brand associated with EFX.
  
  I can tell you that this is [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] play. The Account Managers that work directly with CRA’s are against it and have been put in a position of being forced to implement this change.  It’s time for CRA’s to communicate the costs of using The Work Number to their customers and start a concerted opt-out program. Equifax is all about monitoring transaction volume, and until transactions start dropping Equifax Sr. Leadership will continue with a monopoly mindset and never treat CRA’s as customers. 
  
  I’m happy to talk more, if you want to message or call me directly at [REDACTED]

• Talx Client – “Yes they did eliminate being able to order by company code and you now have to order by SSN, which gets challenging with so many people not wanting to provide a full SSN.  What sucks is that you may have a company on The Work Number and go to pull the results and get three other companies you’re not verifying and no record for the company you do want.  You end up paying for unusable data.”

• Talx Client – When I was verifications product manager, I tried and tried to get them to be reasonable. 

At [REDACTED], we even met with [REDACTED] to create a competing product (with higher prices for TALX). 

Their stance was, we had no choice but to use them. 

Well, we do have a choice. 

1. We can stop encouraging clients to use employment verifications. Put your money into something else that will help reduce risk. Maybe we work on a product that’s a decent personal reference. 
2. We can make the Talx gouging clear to our customers. I suspect most screening customers don’t tie the data back to a single vendor. 
3. We can engage customers – especially the large employers who so freely give their data to TALX – to push back on TALX. This would take an effort from the larger screeners but it can be done. If the employers who give their data to TALX start putting pressure on TALX I think it’s possible we can see relief. I bet those employers don’t even realize that the data they give freely to TALX winds up being a cash cow for Equifax.  It’s probably different departments handling that. 

I know we can’t use NAPBS for this. But there is a way to have conversations with some end users about this. 

• Talx Client – Not sure if this is what you are referring to, but they no longer allow you to run verifications based on company code.  It is my understanding that they did away with the company code search as a result of their relationship with ADP.  Not sure if it is the same for everyone, but CRA’s are now required to run by candidate SSN.  If only one employment history is available you get charged a single employer fee.  If the candidate has 2 or more employers in their history CRA’s get charged for 2 employers regardless of the number of employers over 2. 

• Talx Client – Yes, we delayed it as much as we could, but we are experiencing exactly what [REDACTED] stated. Sadly, because they know they’re the single-source supplier of this data, they are certainly taking advantage of their position.  Ultimately, it’s our clients who suffer. 

Best,

Jason