Recruitment Solutions, the recruitment arm of Business Australia, brings together several leading brands to deliver high-quality recruitment services to diverse sectors, including healthcare, apprenticeships, blue-collar labour hire, and community care.
Across the diverse industries the group services, there is a common thread: an ever-growing demand for qualified workers. As a result, Recruitment Solutions is always looking for ways to increase efficiencies and fill more vacancies for its clients.
National Operations Manager Dion Beverakis, who oversees the suite of businesses, was aware that manual reference checking was causing delays. However, he wasn’t aware there was a better way until he attended a conference presentation by Neil Rose, Director at Referoo.
I knew it was taking time to get hold of referees, and it was slowing down candidate placement, but until I saw Neil’s presentation, I wasn’t aware that it was something we could control,” he says.
“I immediately thought this is a great solution, exactly what we need. So I took the idea to the team, and they immediately got excited.”
Dion engaged Referoo for a small pilot at one of their nursing brands and was amazed by the results.
"From the outset, it was successful. Not only did Referoo increase our speed to recruit and reference response rate, but it reduced our labour costs too. We didn’t have people calling a referee two or three times to collect a reference – we could deploy those resources elsewhere,” he says.
And our shift working referees could complete the reference when it suited them, which was often outside of business hours, he adds.
On the back of a successful pilot, Dion rolled Referoo out across Recruitment Solutions businesses and says he was incredibly impressed with both the product and Referoo’s service.
“Referoo was with us every step of the way – and still is. Whenever we have a question or challenge, they are there to address it.”
Dion points to his complex reporting needs as an example. “Working across five businesses, I needed a single report, and it was taking time to pull. I understood that this was due to our complex operating environment, but I mentioned it in passing to Neil. He immediately went to work on it, and we suddenly had a full report we could pull in seconds.”
“It’s that kind of support that sets Referoo apart. We felt we had a great partnership from the very beginning.”
Dion says that Referoo has actively worked with the business to customise the solution for his diverse needs.
“In our apprenticeship business, for example, many of our candidates are straight out of school, so they don’t have a professional reference. Referoo made it easy for us to use the system for character references.”
Using Referoo across all five businesses has produced impressive results for Recruitment Solutions.
“We have saved significant time and labour and eliminated a bottleneck,” Dion says. He also mentions two additional benefits he wasn’t expecting: improved reference quality and better security.
“The consistency and quality of our references have improved significantly. We’re not relying on a conversation to uncover everything about a candidate, and we are getting far more detail as a result,” he says.
The security and fraud detection features have also been surprisingly beneficial. There have been a few occasions where candidates have been caught asking family or friends to give them professional references. It would be hard to detect that otherwise, Dion adds.