Verification SLIs and SLOs: The Metrics That Hold Up in Audit

Recommendation: treat verification as an identity gate, not a checkbox. Without SLIs and SLOs, you will fail the first serious audit question: who approved this candidate, when, and based on what evidence. Scenario: a remote hire receives privileged access, then an incident triggers an internal investigation. The ATS shows a status change but no evidence pack, and manual exceptions were handled in email. Quantified exposure: replacement costs can be 50-200% of annual salary depending on role. Offer delays and offer-to-start fallout increase when unverified identity causes rework late in the funnel. Threat baseline: Checkr reports 31% of hiring managers say they have interviewed someone later found using a false identity. Pindrop reports 1 in 6 remote applicants showed signs of fraud in one pipeline.

Recommendation: stop relying on an ATS plus point solutions to produce audit-ready controls. The market failed because most tools were built for sequential checks, not event-based orchestration. Legacy patterns create operational risk: sequential checks that slow hiring, no immutable event logs, no unified evidence packs, no review-bound SLAs, no standardized rubric storage, and shadow workflows across portals and spreadsheets. Compliance impact: a pass/fail screen is not defensible. If it is not logged, it is not defensible.

Recommendation: assign ownership per metric and per decision so Compliance sets policy, Recruiting Ops runs the workflow, and Security controls access and review operations. Recruiting Ops owns workflow orchestration and is accountable for completion rate and latency SLO adherence at the funnel level. Security owns identity gating policy, reviewer access control, and fraud policy. Security is accountable for fraud adjudication and evidence sufficiency. Hiring Manager owns rubric discipline and must not score unverified candidates for defined risk tiers. Analytics owns metric definitions, dashboard correctness, and segmentation so teams can self-serve time-to-event and failure modes. Sources of truth: ATS for lifecycle state; verification service for identity artifacts and outcomes; interview and assessment systems for artifacts tied to verified identity event IDs.

Recommendation: instrument verification like secure access management. SLIs are operational health signals and SLOs are enforceable targets with escalation paths. Define SLIs with explicit numerators and denominators: completion rate, verification latency (p50 and p95), manual review rate, and fraud catch rate tied to evidence packs. Set SLOs by risk tier and role criticality, not one global number. Define completion minima, latency p95 maxima, review queue age limits, and evidence pack completeness requirements. Operational rule: time delays cluster at moments where identity is unverified. Use time-to-event analytics to find the exact step where the queue ages. Governance rule: a decision without evidence is not audit-ready. Fraud catch rate is only meaningful if every flag has a timestamped reason code and attached artifacts.

IntegrityLens AI enables an ATS-anchored control plane that treats verification as identity gating before access, with logs and evidence packs that are reconstructable under audit. Typical end-to-end verification time is 2-3 minutes for document plus voice plus face, enabling early gating without late-stage rework. Capabilities that matter operationally: - Advanced biometric identity verification (liveness, face match, document auth) that emits timestamped events. - Fraud prevention including deepfake detection, proxy interview detection, and behavioral signals to justify step-up verification. - Immutable evidence packs and compliance-ready audit trails tied to ATS lifecycle events. - AI screening interviews available 24/7 to parallelize checks instead of waterfall workflows. - Technical assessments with execution telemetry and plagiarism detection across 40+ languages to reduce integrity ambiguity.

• Allowing interviews or assessments before the identity gate because the manual review queue is backed up. - Accepting a vendor portal pass/fail without importing timestamps, reason codes, and reviewer identity into an ATS-anchored audit trail. - Using a single global SLO for all roles, which forces either over-review (queue explosion) or under-control (missed fraud) depending on volume.

If you want to implement this tomorrow: - Write SLI definitions with numerators and denominators for completion rate, latency, manual review rate, and fraud catch rate. - Publish tiered SLOs and an exceptions policy with version control. - Move identity gating earlier and hard-block unverified candidates from defined stages by tier. - Stand up review-bound SLAs with queue age limits, named reviewers, and escalation routing. - Require ATS-anchored audit trails: who approved, when, and the evidence pack ID. If it is not logged, it is not defensible. - Deploy segmented risk dashboards recruiters can access without a ticket: time-to-event, failure reasons, review queue age, exceptions. - Run weekly governance that ties telemetry to staffing and policy tuning, not anecdotes. Expected outcomes: reduced time-to-hire via measurable queue control, defensible decisions via evidence packs, lower fraud exposure via step-up adjudication, and standardized scoring via rubric discipline tied to verified identity events.