Director of Product Development - Director of Product Development First Advantage Employee Review

People drive the success of First Advantage and our folks are amazing individuals who care about our customers, each other and our company; and for that we are truly grateful. Our company is growing, transforming and full of opportunity. Our market place is very dynamic, constantly changing and highly competitive. As the largest and most successful global company in background screening, we are required to consistently look for ways to grow, improve and create even better outcomes for our clients, which includes big investments in innovation, technology and our people. It also requires us to be as efficient as we possibly can with managing our costs so we can offer the best value to our clients and fund our investments. When we make efficiency improvements or adjust focus to serve our client needs, it may mean we don’t require as much of a certain type of skill. When making resource adjustments, our first priority is to protect people and jobs; therefore, we tend to allow natural employee attrition to cover the change. For the most part that works well but infrequently we require reducing staffing by a very small percentage. For this year and last year it was roughly 0.1% of our over 4,800 global team members. However, we do everything we can to avoid these reductions. For instance, during the reduction process we make sure that we make the decision based the individual’s performance as retaining our best people is extremely critical. We attempt to find new roles for those high performing individuals with one of the roughly 200 positions available each year in the U.S. alone. If that doesn’t work out, we support the individual with severance and transition support. Our Company is committed to our team members. However, we continue to learn where we are not doing well and shift or make investments to help us improve so that our folks are the best they can be and enjoy their role, the team and their managers. I spend a lot of time with employees doing in person town hall meetings and information sessions that we broadcast globally — and my leaders are required to do the same. It’s from these meetings that we get the real pulse of our folks and how well we are doing. We are also investing in making our leaders better at leading people and championing our culture. As an example, over the past few months all our leaders around the world attended a two-day training session, led by me, to improve communications and collaboration skills all critical to living up to our commitment to our company values. This training will also be offered as shorter modules for all our team members. In addition to our recent investments, we are also stepping up our formal client service and sales training program with instructor-led classroom sessions. I’m happy to report that our sales staff receives the most comprehensive and engaging sales training in the industry thanks to our training professionals who have over 20 years of experience equipping sales to help service our clients. We also expanded our talent development resource focus to provide additional, hands-on training to our account and services team members. Despite all that we are doing, we still recognize that we are on a journey - as a company and as individuals, including me - and we still have improvements to make to be as good as we all aspire to be. The feedback we receive from our folks helps keep us grounded in what improvement needs to happen and how. I really appreciate when our colleagues take the time to share feedback internally as it also shows that they truly care.