From hiring to employee engagement to hearings related to workplace grievances, HR professionals carry out diverse tasks. Staying organized and keeping records of meetings and conversations is often essential for HR. When legal matters arise, including accusations of sexual harrassment, racism or discrimination, recordings and transcripts become a form of protection for the company and its employees.
However, transcripts are also used by HR for simple convenience and efficiency as materials to easily reference, as well as to meet employees’ accessibility needs for events and meetings. The use cases go on and on, but at the end of the day, HR is capturing and responsible for a great deal of sensitive data that it must protect.
Why HR Professionals Need Transcripts
From marketing efforts to employee accessibility, businesses and their HR teams are using transcripts in a variety of ways:
HR Interviews
Recording and transcribing interviews is helpful for HR team members who may want to look over the transcripts when making critical personnel decisions. Especially in cases where teams are conducting multiple interviews, having a record of candidates’ answers is an excellent way to compare and contrast potential new hires to select the best person for the role. With an accurate transcript, professionals minimize any risk of forgetting how a person responded to a specific query. Interview transcripts can also allow people who were not present the chance to weigh in on a person’s credentials and responses.
Employee Training
Employees’ experiences during training and onboarding can significantly impact their performance in their new role and the business’s employee retention rate. Often when a new hire faces so much information all at once, they may feel overwhelmed and forget some of what they learned. Offering a transcript that they can search and use to refresh their memory presents them with a lifeline that saves them from needing to reask questions.
Company Meetings
Keeping notes in a meeting can feel hectic. If a notetaker becomes distracted for even a moment, they can miss something important. By transcribing meetings, teams can avoid taking notes and instead maintain a complete record of everything they covered.
The transcript can also allow people who were not present at the meeting an opportunity to review everything the team discussed. This process ultimately saves time by minimizing the need to repeat topics.
Disciplinary Hearings
When HR professionals conduct disciplinary hearings, the need for accurate, secure transcripts is vital. The record of these proceedings is a way to mitigate the company’s risk of legal liability. If there is a complete record, a disgruntled employee cannot make false or misleading claims about what happened at a hearing or meeting.
The record can also prove that the company addressed grievances if the circumstances warrant a complaint and response. Ensuring that there is an accurate record can help deescalate the situation by documenting everything that occurred to avoid the misconstruing of anyone’s words after the fact.
The Critical Importance of Transcription Security in HR
With access to a great deal of the company’s communications and records, HR professionals must ensure they’re keeping all information secure.
When employees join a company, they often share identifying, banking and other personal information with HR professionals. The HR team is responsible for handling this sensitive information, as well as documents and transcripts of internal meetings, employee town halls where the company’s financial health or client information is shared and records of when employees face disciplinary actions. Failing to keep those records private can expose the business to liability on multiple levels.
Therefore, it’s critical to consider how the company or its vendor generates and keeps records and transcripts. If employing a transcription service, it’s necessary to investigate that vendor’s security practices and standards. In today’s world, companies store much of their information in the cloud. A data breach can cost companies millions of dollars, expose them to lawsuits and cause damage to their brand that may linger for years.
It’s a good idea to check for SOC 2 compliance. SOC 2 is a security standard for software as a service (SAAS) providers. Businesses that take these measures seriously understand the vital need to protect user data. Transcription providers must ensure adequate security, whether the transcript is from an interview, disciplinary hearing, training session or a standard meeting where confidential intel is shared. Verbit is a transcription partner that meets SOC 2 compliance.
Outsourcing for Efficient Transcription for HR
Security challenges shouldn’t sway you from enlisting a transcription provider to make your process and workload more efficient.
Providers like Verbit use tools, including automatic speech recognition (ASR), to streamline the process. This method saves time and resources compared to manually transcribing notes and calls. Verbit’s sophisticated AI provides automatic live transcription for immediate needs and accessibility. The final, accurate, word-for-word transcripts can serve as legal backing for HR professionals and their businesses.
While some automatic, free transcription tools exist, few offer the accuracy and security that Verbit can provide. Verbit also learns each business so that with more use, it quickly picks up on various accents, dialects and terms a company uses. As a result, Verbit offers improved automated transcription results but then takes it a step further by enlisting professional human transcribers for fact-checking.
In the end, Verbit offers HR professionals unlimited bandwidth to cover all company needs for transcription, 99%+ accuracy that meets the high standards required for legal matters and full security for peace of mind.