Automated Reference Checking for Small Businesses

According to recent data from The Josh Bersin Company and AMS, a global recruitment company, it’s taking employers 44 days to fill a position, with the hardest roles to fill taking more than 70 days.

Time-to-hire has seen year-over-year increases since the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s costing companies time, resources, and productivity. Not only does less work get done when you need to fill a position, but much of that work will fall on other team members, leading to higher rates of burnout and employee dissatisfaction. 

One way to speed up your time to hire while preserving quality of hire is to implement an automated reference check technology–and you don’t have to be a huge enterprise-level company to take advantage of automated reference checks. 

What Is an Automated Reference Check?

Reference checking refers to the process of reaching out to a job applicant’s references to verify items on their resume, gain insight into their work history, and get valuable feedback from former employers and peers. 

Traditionally, reference checks are conducted manually, which means hiring leaders will email or call references individually. While you can get valuable insights through manual reference checks, they often take much longer and can be subject to unconscious bias.

Automated reference checks help optimize your hiring process with speed and efficiency while simultaneously driving your quality of hire metrics. With automated reference checks, your solution will send out automated reference reports to referees, provide you with data-driven insights within a day or two, and provide you with competency and culture insights along the way.

The Importance of Automated Reference Checks for Small Businesses

If you’re struggling to fill quality hires at fast rates, you aren’t alone. Part of why time-to-hire is taking longer is because, despite inflation, the job market has been strong, with unemployment reaching pre-pandemic rates and employment rates continuing to increase month over month. 

If you’re interviewing a quality hire, it’s important to know that top candidates stay available for only 10 days before accepting a job, and 31 percent of those candidates will decline an offer because they had another job offer. 

As a small business, you might be competing with enterprise companies with bigger names and brand equity—the faster you can get a job offer out to a quality candidate, the better chance you’ll have at landing that hire before the competition gets to them. 

How Small Businesses Can Conduct Automated Reference Checks

Cutting-edge technologies, like Crosschq 360, make conducting automated references easier than ever for small businesses. 

Because Crosschq integrates directly into your ATS, it automatically sends questions to referees with questions suited specifically to the role. As soon as the easy-to-fill reference questionnaire is complete, Crosschq will send your team a comprehensive report. 

Crosschq 360 will:

• Provide you with key insights in 24-48 hours
• Flag potential reference check fraud
• Reduce your reference check time by 95 percent
• Flag potential candidate history concerns
• Integrate candidate references into your talent pool
• Collect and analyze data to continuously learn key candidate skills and competencies, specific to your business

What to Ask in Automated Reference Checks

The questions you ask in an automated reference check will depend on the role you’re filling and the skills you’re seeking. You can assess soft skills, hard skills, behavioral skills, and more. 

If you’re unsure what to ask in a reference check, take a look at the several guides we’ve written on reference checks for specific jobs and business structures:

• Best reference check questions to ask
• Reference check questions for startup positions
• Reference check templates and tips
• Reference check questions for operations roles
• Reference check questions for software engineer positions
• Reference check questions for leadership positions

Getting Started With Automated Reference Checks

Crosschq’s 360 automated reference check software fits right into your existing workflow, which makes it fast and easy to use. Crosschq 360 will optimize your reference check process, providing you with the long-term benefits of having an increased talent pool and analytics that your software can learn from.

If you’re ready to save your hiring team hundreds of hours of recruiting time, assess hiring competencies and culture fit, and drive your hiring capabilities, sign up for a Crosschq demo today.