KinCare uses Referoo to find the right candidates in a high-stakes environment

KinCare is a leading provider of in-home care services, with a 28-year history of supporting older Australians and people with disability to live independently. From domestic and personal care support around the home to qualified nursing care and physiotherapy, KinCare has it covered.
The mission to help more Australians live independently is evident across the business. From the customer care team that helps clients navigate the myriad of aged care and NDIS options to senior management, the corporate and frontline teams are committed to this goal.

The Challenge

To support the thousands of Australians that rely on KinCare, it’s critical that it hires the right people, from customer service through to frontline roles. Add in an ageing population driving demand and a skill shortage across the industry, and it’s easy to see why this recruitment team is so busy.

In the last six weeks, KinCare has completed a staggering 205 references for roles across corporate, frontline and allied health. Ben Campton, KinCare’s Talent Acquisition Partner, is responsible for corporate recruitment, which can account for up to 15 roles a month.

Ben says traditional reference checks were proving a bottleneck for the team, particularly when trying to get referees on the phone in an industry where shift work is the norm.

We were doing traditional reference checks, where you would call a referee and save notes in a Word document in the candidate’s file. But it was hard to actually get people on the phone and there’d be a lot of phone tag. We didn’t have an admin team to follow these up, so we were spending hours trying to chase people down.

The Solution

KinCare looked for a solution to not only clear this bottleneck, but ensure they received quality genuine references. Manual references are hard to verify, which leaves organisations open to reference fraud.

After a full-service free trial of Referoo, the KinCare team was quickly convinced it was the right solution. Alongside faster, higher quality and genuine references, Referoo enables KinCare to customise reference questions to each role, save references to a candidate’s file to maintain compliance and easily report on status and activity. The team can also choose how to complete references, from SMS and online to phone calls, as would best suit the role and the referee.

The Results

With Referoo, KinCare has reduced its average reference turnaround time from 48+ hours to just seven. In a competitive and candidate-short market, Ben says this is helping them secure the right people.

Across the healthcare industry, there is a struggle to find good people. There are a lot of job opportunities out there, so candidates have a great deal of choice. A slow process can make it even harder to secure talent. Referoo really speeds up the process of closing out the deal.

Referoo’s flexible design also gives Ben the opportunity to meet differing needs of each role and hiring manager. “Our hiring managers will often have quite specific needs for a role, and I like that they can come to me with the questions they want to ask a referee, and I can quickly and easily customise the reference check in Referoo.”

Ben also says that Referoo’s superior fraud detection gives him peace of mind in a high-stakes game. “We’ve already had a few references flagged by the IP matching technology,” he says.

“In some cases, there were genuine reasons for the candidate and referee sharing an IP address, but we’ve also had cases where there were not. You’ve really got to think if someone will start the relationship by lying regardless of their intent, is that someone you want to put in front of your clients? These incidents may not have been identified if it weren’t for Referoo.”

Beyond these more overtly fraudulent references, Ben says Referoo has also been helpful in identifying those where the referee wasn’t the most appropriate person, allowing KinCare to ask for further references. “In these cases, no one lied about who they were, but it was clear that the referee didn’t have the right experience with the candidate to be providing a solid reference.”

Ben says Referoo now does more than 95% of his reference checking, taking hours of manual admin off his plate. He recalls a previous manager telling him that online reference checking was a game changer; something he can now attest to.

That manager was absolutely right. Once you move your reference checking online, you won’t go back.