14 April, 2023
The practice of validating candidate information during hiring emerged in the 1990s with the dawn of the digital age and has since expanded rapidly in response to significant global events such as GDPR and COVID-19. While countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom have historically led these practices, the varied cultural makeup of Europe has made the region slower to adopt pre-employment checks for criminal history, educational verification, or online activity. Even as more regulated industries began to carry out screenings in Europe, the separation between data providers for various checks made it a relatively slow process for employers and a disjointed experience for their candidates.
With a background in staffing and hiring, Harm Voogt set out to pioneer this emerging category – and improve upon it – by founding Validata in 2009. ‘Harm thought there should be a much better solution for checking things like education or work experience. At that time a lot of companies did it by hand manually, and there was a huge opportunity to automate,’ said DISA Managing Director, Bart Bijkerk.
The Amsterdam-based startup was looking for a resource-efficient way to get into market quickly, while being open and flexible to the many data providers they would inevitably need to integrate with. Validata, now DISA Global Solutions, chose to leverage low-code development to build their core software offering, which today enables over 1,300 organizations offer a seamless employment screening process.
Defining an Emerging Category with Emerging Technology
In 2009, Validata, now DISA, quickly began investigating how to bring their software to market with Bart Bijkerk taking the lead. His recruitment industry experience focused heavily on IT, and he also had close proximity to IT projects as a business collaborator throughout his career.
‘Previously I was working for a company where we needed a new software system so we enlisted a partner to help us. We started with a good foundation – sharing all the functional designs and set up – and they went off and started working in a more traditional waterfall way. They came back after a year with something that was not what we had put on paper,’ he recalled.
This all-too-common experience prompted Bijkerk to look at both traditional and new development methods to create DISA’s core software offering. ‘I was open to looking at options for open-source or low-code. Low-code was a very new thing in the software development market at the time,’ said Bijkerk, ‘but this new company in Rotterdam, Mendix, told us that they could build something for us in two to three months, and the more traditional software development companies quoted us at six to twelve months, so we decided to give low-code a try and see if we could make it happen.’
The speed to market and collaborative nature of low-code ultimately made Mendix the right foundation for Validata, and both organizations had a unique opportunity to grow up together. As Mendix evolved from building applications to an enterprise software development platform, Validata iterated on their core software offering and landed their first major client in 2010 – a large financial services institution – reinforcing the criticality of what they’d set out to do.
After an initial rebuild of their original Mendix application, Validata continued using the same solution for another three years. ‘In 2014 we decided that we had gathered enough new knowledge about the market and the development to rebuild again, and that was the first time we gave our software system a name – it was called Core Next Gen. We built it with Finaps, a Mendix partner, and for the first time we also brought in some in-house developers on our side,’ said Bijkerk. ‘There were a lot of new possibilities with that system when compared to the first two.’
‘In 2018 we were thinking about how the next couple of years were going to look – what did we want to do, and how did we want to grow,’ he continued. Bijkerk and the team remained true to their core mission to speed the turnaround time for screenings even further, and in 2019 began working on their current flagship solution – Valluga, now known as the DISA International Platform.