We’ve been listening, and January reflects that. Welcome to the January edition of our monthly product updates, a quick way to keep you in the loop on what we’ve been working on for the last month. Here’s what’s new:

Automated update service rechecks - Truly free

Update Service rechecks are now genuinely free and fully automated, making it practical to recheck every three months instead of every three years.

Once Zinc identifies a candidate on the DBS Update Service, we’ll automatically schedule and run quarterly rechecks, no extra checks, no clicks, no chasing, and no fees (Zinc covers the cost and the operational work).

Click here for more information

CV checks now supported for Lever

CV checks are now available for teams using Lever. Zinc automatically pulls candidate CVs from Lever, so checks can run without manual uploads — saving time and reducing errors.

What you need to do

If you’re an existing Lever customer and want to use CV checks: you’ll need to re-authenticate once. Just click Activate Lever integration in Zinc.
If you’re new to Lever: you’re ready to go — it works out of the box.
If you’re not using CV checks: nothing changes for you.

How it works
When a candidate reaches a configured stage in Lever, Zinc will automatically:

pull the CV from Lever, and
run the CV check (no manual upload needed).

What recruiters will see in Lever

Checks sent tag when the CV is pulled successfully.
CV error tag if there’s no CV attached, or the file type isn’t supported.

If there’s an error, Zinc won’t create a request. Recruiters can upload a valid CV and re-submit the check.

Spotlight on Analytics

The beginning of the year is a great time to review what’s working, prepare for what’s ahead, and set clear hiring targets. Zinc’s Analytics gives you the tools to understand your hiring trends, process performance and overall candidate experience — all in one place.

When you head to the Insights tab, you’ll land on Analytics, where you’ll see a snapshot of your key product performance metrics.

Overview

The Overview dashboard gives you a high-level view of activity across your account:

Requests over time helps you spot hiring peaks and troughs, making it easier to plan capacity.

Packages used shows how different packages are being used, so you can see which locations are hiring most, or which role types are driving demand.

Package performance

The Package Performance section helps you dig a little deeper:

The map view shows where checks are being carried out, often reflecting where candidates have previously lived or worked.
Completion rates highlight the percentage of requests that have been completed. If this looks lower than expected, it may be due to a recent surge in requests, or checks that weren’t cancelled for candidates who didn’t proceed.

Engagement

The Engagement dashboard focuses on the candidate journey:

Time to start shows how quickly candidates begin their checks after receiving an invitation. If this is longer than expected, it can help to set clear expectations during the recruitment process — for example, asking candidates to start within two days.
Candidate Experience Score reflects how candidates felt about completing their checks. If anything looks concerning, we’d always love to hear your candidates’ feedback so we can continue improving the experience.

There’s even more to explore across the Analytics dashboards, but these core metrics can already help you build scalable, global background checking processes — while delivering a great experience for your candidates. 🙌

As always, if you’d like help interpreting your data or digging deeper, your Zinc team is here to help.

Coming soon

To keep you excited for what's still around the corner here at Zinc we wanted to give you a peek into a feature we are really excited about.

Set combined criteria within reference packages

You will soon be able to set combined requirements within a reference package, so candidates must meet multiple criteria at the same time, not just one or the other. This gives you more control over what’s required, for example ensuring a candidate provides at least five years of history and two references before they can proceed.

Whilst December is often associated with end of year parties and cozy evenings at home, the Zinc team were hard at work improving our product so that we can continue to deliver the easy, instant and delightful Zinc experience that you expect.

Here is a quick summary of the improvements we made to our product in December.

In-app and email feature communications

We’re now sharing all product updates in one place — through our new in-app What’s new section, changelog page and by email for any high-impact changes.

Whats new

Only hear about what matters to you. We look at the checks you run and the integrations you use, so we don’t fill your inbox with updates that aren’t relevant.
Fine-tune your preferences anytime. You can update what you’d like to hear about in your account settings.

Other improvements we made in December

UK visa expiry dates are now listed on the Schedule page, so you can easily track upcoming expiries and rerun checks all in one place. Click here for more info.
Australian criminal check submissions are now much simpler for candidates, thanks to our improved points calculation interface.
You can now view the email used to send checks to a candidate directly from their individual progress and report pages. This makes it easier to check they’ve received their checks or quickly find the email you need.
Individual check turnaround times are now available in the Checks sub-tab of the Analytics section within Insights.
Your All Checks report now includes the dates candidates start and complete their checks. You’ll find this in Insights → Reporting.
If a referee’s email address bounces, Zinc will help keep things moving by suggesting an alternative email address from the same company, where available.
We’ve updated our Greenhouse integration and Partner API to support Word (.doc/.docx) CVs for CV checks, bringing them in line with Workday. Recruiters can now submit Word files without background check requests failing, with the same smooth experience across all integrations.

Product Updates

🚀 Zinc product update - January