How do you know your trucking ATS is safe?
Ten truck fleets. Ten thousand trucks fleets. For-hire, Private, OTR, LTL, and 3PL fleets. Tenstreet’s clients come to us in all the sizes and types that exist in the trucking industry. If a company has a fleet, no matter how big or small, we help its people solve the problem of how to find, hire, and retain truck drivers in our high-velocity, highly-regulated industry.
Prospective clients traditionally ask us questions focused on features and functionality, such as:
- “What percent of DOT applications does IntelliApp pre-populate?” (about 88%, by the way)
- “How does Tenstreet’s Job Store create a unique path to reach drivers my company is likely to hire?”
- “How does Tenstreet’s platform help me hire more drivers with less effort?”
These are all great questions. But these days, savvy prospects and clients alike are asking us a new one:
- “What are you doing to protect my company and keep my information safe?”
This question makes us smile because we have a great story to tell and because these clients are focused not only on what is right in front of them, but also what threatens them around the corner. From data security to client privacy to regulatory compliance, Tenstreet has solutions like no one else in the industry.
Your Information is Yours, Not Ours
We want to be absolutely clear on this first point. Our clients give us long-term custody of their data. In return, we keep it safe for them. This means we do not share that data with anyone without permission (and even then, it’s usually an authorized ad agency or background screening company, never another Tenstreet client). We have never, ever provided any client’s data to another client (not even a little). Similarly, we do not share an applicant’s information or application with anyone other than the company he or she intended it to go to.
These were cardinal rules when we founded the company and they remain guideposts for us still today. Our reputation for being trustworthy with data for both clients and truck drivers is critical. If we lost the trust of either group, our platform’s value to both groups would fall. Many drivers know when a company uses Tenstreet’s platform. Those drivers actively seek out companies who use Tenstreet because they’re easier to work with. There is no scenario where it would somehow benefit Tenstreet to do anything but safeguard drivers’ interests, too.
Taking it a step beyond simply data, we also do not tell any client what the processes of another client look like. It’s not just data that is secret. Business practices are too. Sometimes a company will ask us how another company handles its processes. We never answer this question. Tenstreet has many subject matter experts who will help you structure the processes and workflows of your company for maximum effectiveness, but we never comment on how another client operates. If there are ever concerns about the confidentiality of your data with Tenstreet, we’d love the opportunity to put those concerns to rest.
Information Security
Tenstreet has implemented a thorough information security program that helps ensure the security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy of our clients’ data. Our security program and its controls are audited regularly by third-party technology auditors who determine whether our controls are designed and implemented properly. This means that the auditors also test the controls to ensure they are both appropriate and actually in place and working. This is called a “SOC2 Type 2” audit. We believe that we are the only platform or software in our space of the trucking industry that has achieved the SOC2 Type 2 certification. If you do not use Tenstreet, ask your current vendor (or even your own IT department) about its formal, documented information security program and whether they’ve achieved SOC2 or equivalent certification.
Compliance is Hard
Anyone who says that compliance is easy when hiring truck drivers hasn’t been on the receiving end of a Fair Credit Reporting Act lawsuit or grumpy DOT auditor. For the FCRA in particular, recent court decisions have made it completely impractical for companies to understand every changing nuance in the law. Even for our clients who have full-time General Counsel, it’s unlikely that they’re able to keep up with all the changes. We are aware of law firms that file multiple class-action FCRA lawsuits every week against companies. Trucking companies are often specifically targeted because of their high turnover and the likelihood that a background (consumer) report has been run. Companies who rely on the transportation exception when getting authorization to run a background screen (the so-called “verbal release”) are being targeted even more ruthlessly.
We see these risks and build solutions to address them. Why put yourself at additional risk from an FCRA lawsuit when you can get a signed authorization (i.e., release) in seconds? With our solution, you can just send a text to the driver and they can sign a release right on their phone. Take the headache out of pre-adverse and adverse action letters by sending them straight out of our software (you are sending these, right? Numerous trucking companies, big and small, were sued for not sending them last year). Make sure there are no misunderstandings on MVRs and other background reports by having them also delivered in real time straight to the driver through Tenstreet’s Driver Pulse. Because drivers store their data with us, most of them can submit a full DOT-compliant application from their smart phone in just a few minutes (and fewer than 25% of Tenstreet applications are completed on a traditional desktop computer now).
We devote enormous resources to keeping current with the latest decisions and laws. We regularly write blog posts and hold webinars where we provide information about how to structure client processes to help with FCRA compliance. We go over and above to help our clients – last month, after the Ninth Circuit court made a highly technical but far-reaching FCRA decision, we even reviewed the FCRA Disclosure and Authorization (release) forms our clients had implemented. We notified over a thousand of them that they had compliance problems with the language they’d provided to us. We helped them get the issues fixed by providing sample language they could adopt. To be clear, we always recommend that you get your hiring processes reviewed by competent FCRA counsel. Your compliance is ultimately your responsibility, but we are continually trying to help in ways that no one else in the industry is.
Know the Risks and Take Action
When we at Tenstreet think about our business, we think about more than customer service, features and functionality. We also think about the overall value we deliver. We think about all the ways we can meaningfully reduce client risk and the trucking industry’s risk as a whole. That’s why we place importance on critical features under the hood of our system such as data security, privacy, and compliance.
We are fanatical about delivering value in all aspects of our platform – not just those that are easily visible in a demo.
Which brings us back to our title question…
“How does Tenstreet Secure Client Information?”
Ask your current vendor about what third-party data security certifications they’ve obtained. Ask them if they’re SOC2 certified. Ask them about the steps they take to help keep your company compliant that go beyond what can appear on the screen of a phone or computer, even as more and more transportation companies are being sued. Ask if your vendor has ever accidentally routed an application to the wrong customer.
And then ask us those questions. We love answering them.
