Find Recruitment accelerates hiring with Referoo

Find Recruitment is a New Zealand-owned and operated recruitment agency founded in 2008.

They are committed to building great teams, helping candidates find the perfect fit for their skills and delivering a level of care unlike any other to their clients.

Co-Founder and Director, Julian Greaves, said they loved the personal touch of a phone call when checking candidates’ references. However, as their business quickly grew, they needed to find ways to improve efficiencies while continuing to deliver a high-quality candidate experience.

The Challenge

With increasing client and candidate numbers, Find Recruitment found themselves taking on an intense amount of manual work and time-consuming administrative tasks that were often accepted as part of the job. Between manual phone calls, chasing down referees, meeting with candidates, liaising with clients and gathering documents for new hires, they didn’t realise there was a better way.

They had always done verbal references, and, like most things, it was just accepted as the way it was. However over time, Julian began to see the imbalance of energy, time and results.

“Really it was just something we’d always done and it was hard to think about doing it differently. There were lots of factors and general resistance that just had existed in the industry for a long time with using any kind of automation tool in fear of being seen as impersonal or unprofessional, so that’s where we were coming from,” he explained.

In addition, spending time on the manual aspect wasn’t the most exciting part of a job he otherwise loved.

“It’s not very exciting when you do credit checks, MOJ checks, or references,” he said.

“The exciting part is finding candidates, interviewing them, matching them with a great client and ultimately placing them in a job they love.”

Our consultants need to be speaking to candidates,” he explained, “not spending hours on administrative tasks.

That just wasn’t possible when Julian and his team were spending an immense amount of time making phone calls and following people up.

The Solution

Enter Referoo.

While he admitted he was sceptical at first after being burned by a previous software that made big promises, Referoo felt different.

“We were looking around for a couple of years for the right solution, and had tried a few products on the market, which ended up not being the right fit for us at all,” he said.

After a few not-so-great experiences, they almost gave up and continued with time-consuming manual reference checks.

“We did verbal references, which we saw as free, so why would we pay for someone to run our references?,” he explained, “But Referoo addressed all of our objections and countered them with the positives, like IP security, for example, verifying who the referee actually is, and the incredible productivity benefits that would really make a difference to us moving forward.”

Julian said that when it came down to it, the benefit of freeing up time for their recruiters made Referoo the obvious choice. From that point forward, the way they run the agency and the day-to-day of their recruiters has been completely transformed.

The Results

Since implementing Referoo, the team has taken to the platform easily and effortlessly, and they’re getting great results from aspects they once feared would be an issue.

“Before using Referoo, we had the belief it was really important to talk to referees over the phone to, A, identify that they were real people, and, B, explore potential opportunities with them if they were hiring managers,” he said.

With Referoo, Find Recruitment consultants no longer need to spend time on the phone to realise those benefits.

Since signing on with Referoo in late 2020…

• Nearly 100 referees expressed interest in joining their talent pool through the software
• Referoo has helped Find pick up 15 new clients using the ‘New Business’ Module
• 94% of references are completed within a day, saving their recruiters countless hours of time

“Our team prefers using Referoo to calling people now. That adoption and shift has happened pretty quickly, so it’s been really good,” he said.

Since using Referoo, Find Recruitment now saves an immense amount of time while also building their talent pool and opening up new opportunities with referees, something they once thought only possible by spending hours on the phone each week.