Simplify your hiring in 2020 with Automated Reference Checks.
According to new research from Robert Half, an American HR consulting firm, HR Directors in the UK spend an average of 27.59 days on recruiting for talent within the organization, with ‘checking references’ being the most time-intensive (5.19 days) activity. 54% of them admitted to losing a preferred candidate to the lengthy hiring process. Another Glassdoor study shows that the time taken to hire new employees has increased dramatically in the last decade.
Finding a highly-skilled professional with the appropriate expertise is essential, however, if your decision-making process is slower than your competitors, you’re bound to have candidates who will accept other job offers while still interviewing with you.
To help your hiring managers focus on their day-to-day responsibilities instead of spending a copious amount of time on-calls with references, you should consider automating this aspect of your talent acquisition process by using Hiringcue.com. In the fast-paced, rapidly advancing recruitment industry, having an automated reference checking system can be game-changing with the following benefits.
Simplify your hiring process by slashing the turnaround time
Reference checking is infamous for being one of the most tedious and cumbersome aspects of any hiring. In numerous cases, only a small percentage of references who you get in touch with will end up going through the entire interviewing process. While some might be simply too occupied and reluctant to devote their time, many others tend to be wary of sharing too much information about their previous employers or colleagues, due to potential legal ramifications.
“Traditional Reference checks are very time-consuming and intrusive to the reference.”, “I have lost many candidates during the time it takes to make contact with a telephone reference.”
Gracy Colliver, Senior Recruiter at People Logics a Dallas Staffing Firm
An average recruiter spends anywhere between 45 minutes to 1 ½ hours making calls to roughly 3 references over 3 to 4 days. However, when using Hiringcue, it will take you 2 minutes to share the tailored questionnaire with the candidate which we forward on the applicant’s behalf to the individuals they listed as references. Now, a majority of the onus of the reference checking process lies on the candidate, which means you’re are only responsible for interpreting our analytical report that drives the final hiring decision.
With Hiringcue’s automated reference checking, HR managers can quickly and affordably manage a large amount of data with little to no effort. Having complete references in one place not only speeds up the hiring and decision-making process but also results in better quality hires.
Get answers to job-specific questions with a customizable questionnaire
A traditional reference checking process often involves the following steps: You conduct the pre-screening of your applicants, interview suitable candidates, and narrow down your final selection possibilities. When the time comes to check for the references listed by the prospective employees, you find that some of the individuals submitted as references are difficult to get in touch with, have very little information to contribute or keep you on call for longer than necessary with small talk that goes practically nowhere.
With Hiringcue’s automated reference checking, you can eliminate all the unwanted run-around and get a better perspective of the applicants by collecting consistent, reliable information in terms of their skill, experience, work ethic, and expertise. You no longer have to spend time sorting through and piecing vague platitudes together to determine the perfect candidate for the job.
Simplify your hiring process, with Hiringcue’s automated reference checking, you can eliminate all the unwanted run-around and get a better perspective of the applicants by collecting consistent, reliable information in terms of their skill, experience, work ethic, and expertise. You no longer have to spend time sorting through and piecing vague platitudes together to determine the perfect candidate for the job.
Depending on your hiring requirements, you can choose from 50 premade questionnaire templates. Standard competency parameters include integrity, team-spirit, work ethics, work performance, or any other job-specific behavior that you find essential to the position you’re hiring for. An ideal reference checking survey has three sections:
- A top-line summary about the candidate, indicating the length of association, overall performance, and probability of rehiring.
- Open-ended, subjective questions about accomplishments, strengths, and improvements.
- Rating/score-based questions about the candidate’s skills.
Ensure honest, candid responses by offering anonymity to the references
References often feel protective of the individuals they have previously had the opportunity to work with, compelling them to share an overtly positive report about their background and qualifications.
With a standardized format, the process seems less personal, ensuring that people are more straightforward and to-the-point in their assessment. For instance, confidentiality offered by our automated questionnaire can act as a considerable incentive for individuals to be more candid about their experience of working with a candidate on an everyday basis.
Automated reference checking allows you to assess a candidate’s abilities carefully. “I was thrilled with the verbatim comments, they are more accurate, more honest than anything I’ve ever seen in verbal reference checking,” says Gracy Colliver, who leads recruiting at People Logics a Dallas based staffing company.
With anonymity in the equation, you can also count on more responses, which helps you track the consistency of references. You should receive between 3 to 6 references after implementing an Hiringcue’s Automated Reference Checks. The more references, the better. This gives you better insights into your applicant’s history.”
Improve and personalize your interview process with actionable candidate insights
A common problem with the old antiquated system is that hiring managers often end up with a collection of incomplete verbal interviews from references, which prevents them from taking a closer look at a candidate’s abilities. Not to mention, reference checking is usually regarded as the last step of the hiring process, after the recruiter has already invested a significant amount of time in shortlisting, interviewing, and eliminating candidates.
Once you’ve collected all the necessary data in a more presentable and cursory-glance friendly format using Hiringcue, you can quickly turn to data-driven insights to determine the candidates best suited for the position before conducting the first in-person interview. For example: According to the references, a candidate ranks high on the problem-solving ability scale. During the interview, you can ask this particular candidate to list a professional situation in the past where they used problem-solving abilities to tackle a challenge.
Track passive candidates and cut costs
Automated reference checking can also help you in maintaining a database of passive candidates that might be open to applying to your organization soon. How? Simple, we add an option to your questionnaire where an individual can indicate that they’d like to be informed about open vacancies. If you are hiring a financial analyst and will need to hire another in a month or two, your passive candidate database should be the first place you look.
When you already have a list of suitable candidates to reach out to, your hiring process is more cost-effective. Since we’re talking money, the initial investment in an automated reference checking system generally costs between $40 and $60 per candidate. However, Hiringcue is different. We let you build your own plan. In our pricing calculator, just indicate how many monthly reference checks you need per month. If you just need one, your cost is only $24.99. When you buy multiple reference checks, the price drops for each additional reference check, with the increase in volume, you can pay as little as $4.99 per reference check. This is a small price to pay (with a big payoff!) for all the time and hassle that Hiringcue’s Automated Reference Checks will save you. Best of all, for a limited time, each credit will only cost $4.99, regardless if you need just 1 or 21.
As a potential employer, automated reference checks help you understand the core competencies of a candidate without having to continuously be on the phone or exchange emails with individuals to solicit feedback. A recent report by Bersin & Associates indicates that more and more companies are opting for reference checking tools to get a comprehensive insight into the top candidates and strengthen their finalist pool.
Apart from streamlining the hiring process, it will also reduce the hirer’s remorse by increasing the quality of your hires. Thanks to the web-based automaton, the reference checking process has become much more manageable, time-saving, cost-effective, and most importantly, incredibly accurate. Hiringcue is cloud-based software so you can request for references with just a few clicks, resulting in quality feedback and better hiring decisions.
Gary Kirksey
CEO
Hiringcue.com