In health and aged care, the recruitment stakes can be incredibly high. Beyond the financial costs, making the wrong hiring decision has the potential to cost you your reputation or, even worse, have a detrimental impact on a vulnerable person in your care.
That’s why your recruitment process must have all the checks and balances in place. The good news is that your technology can play a significant role in this – particularly when it comes to the all-important reference check.
At Referoo, we work with several clients across the health and community services sphere and see first-hand how online reference-checking can provide peace of mind that you’ve made a qualified hire. Here are three ways online reference checking can improve your outcomes.
As demand for qualified healthcare candidates continues to accelerate, moving fast to secure the best candidates is key. However, achieving this in a highly-regulated environment can be challenging. The good news is that it’s an area where an online reference checking solution pays for itself.
Reference checking can be a significant bottleneck in the healthcare sector. You’ve got the trifecta of urgency to fill vacancies, time-poor referees, and shift work, and that can see you playing weeks of phone tag. In contrast, Referoo allows you to send out your reference with a single click, and the referee can complete it at a time that suits them.
We’ve seen turnaround times reduced to as little as 14 hours for our clients in healthcare recruitment, allowing them to fill multiple roles fast. But, of course, speed isn’t the only critical thing – you need to know your references are genuine, and Referoo has you covered there too.
Reference fraud can come in many forms. The whoppers are well-documented in the media, such as the story of the candidate who used a fake resume to get hired in a senior leadership position at Myer. Much more common-place are the simpler lies – asking a friend, family member or colleague to provide a managerial reference, for example, but these can lead to the same outcome: the wrong hire.
This strategy relies on the manual phone reference where the caller doesn’t have any way to guarantee the person on the other end is who they say they are. With Referoo, we have several checks and balances in place to verify a referee’s identity.
Firstly, IP matching determines when a candidate and a referee have completed forms from the same location – not always fraud, but certainly worth looking into as it may mean they are members of the same household. Secondly, you can ask them to add a link to their LinkedIn profile to the reference, so you can quickly confirm they held the right position to provide this specific reference. Thirdly, if you need the certainty of identity, you can use DigitalID™ by Australia Post, fully integrated into the Referoo platform. This allows you to verify a range of identity documents, including passports and Australian visas.
Official qualifications are just one part of the puzzle in care roles, where aptitude and personality play a significant role in success. Reference checks are an invaluable tool to determine demonstrated competency, capability and cultural fit, but if you ask a busy referee in a disruptive phone call, you’re not likely to get the most valuable response.
By allowing a referee to complete a reference at a time that suits them, you’re likely to see an increase in quality. With Referoo, you can easily customise questions to suit any role and make sure you are digging into the information you need to compare candidates with similar qualifications.
In addition, you don’t have to spend time documenting a response, jotting down key points on the fly, relying on memory or spending time transcribing a phone call. With Referoo, it’s all uploaded for you. Even better, we integrate with several ATS and CRM platforms, so you may even be able to get the info straight onto the candidate profile in your existing system.
If you are looking to improve recruitment outcomes in the healthcare sector, get in touch.
We’d love to show you what Referoo could do for you, and we’ll even throw in a free full 14-day trial so that you can experience the benefits for yourself.