IPA stays ahead of the market with Referoo

IPA Recruitment is a recruitment firm with a difference. As a certified social enterprise recruitment agency, 100% of its profits support people with disability and those from disadantaged backgrounds. When it comes to the day-to-day operations, however, IPA runs like a commercial enterprise, with the same needs as any other recruitment business.

With 13 branches across a national footprint, it is a busy agency, employing more than 100 staff. The busy team is tasked with filling a large volume of temporary, contract and permanent roles across the spectrum, from non-skilled labour to senior executive roles and everything in between.

To support the sheer volume and diversity of roles, IPA is always on the lookout for the best tools to get the job done. “We like to invest in the right tools for our people – the ones that help them do their jobs better and stay in front of the market. Our focus is on finding the best candidates first and getting them into the right jobs, so we want to leverage any technologies that can help us achieve this goal,” says Kylie Wickert, Operations Support Manager at IPA Recruitment.

IPA recognises the need to remove time-consuming admin to ensure it has that all-important speed to market.

Finding the right candidates and moving them quickly through the process is a challenge for every recruiter. If you can’t turn it around fast, you are not going to be providing your clients or your candidates with the best possible experience and that impacts your relationships with both sides.

Manual reference checking is a common bottleneck for recruiters. It was no different for IPA, and it’s a challenge that has been heightened as working hours become increasingly flexible.

“Reference checking has always been a game of phone tag. It’s a really time-consuming process that can be annoying for both the recruiter and the referee. In today’s climate, where more and more people aren’t working a standard 9 to 5, the expectation that someone will be available at a particular time is no longer realistic,” Kylie says.

To solve this challenge, IPA recently partnered with Referoo, an Australian-owned and operated online reference-checking solution. “We started looking at online reference checking so that we could get reference checks done outside of hours with quicker turn-around times. It could take up to a week to get a verbal reference check done, but when the referee can do it after hours, it’s a much quicker turnaround.

We also saw that many of our competitors are getting on board with it too, so it’s the way the market is going. We wanted to move with it and speed up our process as well.”

Kylie says the results have already been impressive. “In our first two months with Referoo, we completed 250-300 reference checks. If you think about the time that would take to complete manually, with all the back and forth, the time savings have been significant.

We can also send the report from Referoo directly to our clients, so this is a time-saver as well. The reference report is really professional and it looks and feels like it came from IPA – we can just send it on. It’s one of the added benefits of Referoo – and something that really stood out when comparing it to other products in the market.

With Referoo, the team can choose whether to do phone, online or even SMS reference checks as best suits the client, role and referee. This is something Kylie says has been an incredible support to the team.

“With a lot of roles, particularly those that are blue-collar, referees may not have or regularly use an email address, so having flexibility in how we contact them is key – and the SMS option is perfect for that.”

The team also likes Referoo’s fraud detection features. This includes IP matching to flag when a candidate and referee complete their reference from the same location, giving the recruiter a chance to investigate further. “We absolutely use and observe those IP matches when we are doing reference checks, so we can double-check and verify that the references are genuine.

“We are also going to use Referoo’s Australia Post Digital ID™ integration to check identity as well. These fraud detection tools were one of the many features that attracted us to Referoo.”

Alongside features like fraud detection, Kylie says the team chose Referoo because it allowed them a degree of flexibility, support and customisation to IPA’s business needs other providers couldn’t match. And IPA hasn’t been disappointed.

“We chose Referoo for a number of reasons, but a critical one that really stands out is the flexibility and customisation. The system is designed to support our specific goals and market. We can easily create and customise forms and questionnaires to suit each role and that functionality has been a real win for us with our diverse client base.”

Referoo’s personalised, local and agile support has also been a win for IPA.

I have been really impressed with the Referoo team. It goes a long way when you are working with people who understand and support your business needs. When we ask about new functionality to support our goals, they explore it and provide options – they are agile in thatway. And if something’s not quite working for us, they investigate and respond quickly – it makes a huge difference, Kylie concludes.