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Crosschq Blog
Setting the Standard with an Employment and Reference Check Policy
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A solid employment and reference check policy isn’t just a formality—it’s the foundation of smarter, faster, and better-informed hiring decisions.
To get the most out of your reference checks, you need to make sure they are aligned with your organization’s strategic goals. In today’s talent-driven market, it is essential to set and maintain a standard for your employees that keeps your business on-track towards its objectives. That’s where your policy comes in.
So let’s talk about how your company can redefine its approach to employment verification – and how Crosschq can help.
What is an Employment and Reference Check Policy?
Simply put, a reference check policy is a structured framework that guides how a company verifies candidate qualifications and past performance. Your specific policy may depend on your industry, the role in question, past successes in reference checking, and the specific goals being driven by your recruiting strategy.
However all reference check policies should include these key elements:
- Consistency: The questions you ask must remain consistent, relevant, and up-to-date.
- Compliance: Your reference checks must meet legal and ethical standards, and should be updated to meet new policy if and when it is introduced.
- Transparency: How you use information gathered through reference checks should be apparent to both the reference and the candidate.
The Crosschq platform helps to uplift these three essential components with modern programming that reflects the current best practices within recruiting.
Benefits of a Strong Employment and Reference Check Policy
A reference check policy that works to streamline your candidate vetting process can provide a number of competitive benefits. Let’s take a look at some of the top advantages.
Build Trust and Transparency
Your policy is not just a guidepost for your recruiters, but also for incoming candidates. With a strong policy, which candidates may read as a part of the job application process, they will understand the work that has gone into creating a fair and effective reference-checking practice.
Reduce Hiring Risks
A reference check policy also helps to reduce bias in individual reference checks – protecting both the candidate from accidental discrimination, and your company from making the wrong hiring decision due to human error or sentiment.
Crosschq helps you to make the right hire the first time, by verifying credentials and past performance with data-backed insights.
Streamline Compliance
Having a policy in place prompts regular need-based changes to your process. This means that tracking and updating for compliance will happen faster, and more easily, with little to no lapse.
Crosschq makes this even easier by providing an automated solution that alerts team members once a policy or process is nearing non-compliance.
Essential Elements of a Modern Reference Check Policy
Whatever vertical you’re operating in, there are a few key components you must include in your reference check policy.
- Purpose and scope of reference checks. Why are you asking for references, how will references be used, and what do you hope to achieve with the information you gain from these references?
- Guidelines for selecting references. This is for both the candidate-facing side of your policy, as well as the team side. Candidates should understand that the success of their application may hinge on the quality of their reference, so it’s important they be carefully chosen.
- The use of digital tools like Crosschq for consistency and efficiency. Modern talent want to know that their references won’t get lost in some pile on an obscure desk. As much for their trust as for your team’s efficiency and efficacy, modern tools that help bolster the reference process should be included as part of your policy.
It’s also easy to build a personalized policy around these foundational elements. Crosschq ensures your policy adapts to industry-specific requirements with machine-learning and AI intelligence, making recommendations for your policy based on past successes and broader reference checking practices within your vertical.
Legal and Ethical Considerations for Reference Checks
Reference checking is subject to legal guidelines, and it is critical that your own policy reflect those policies set forward by governing bodies. Here are a few things to keep in mind when writing your policy.
Compliance with Privacy Laws
Your team must ensure that your policies and practices adhere to GDPR, CCPA, and other regulations put forward depending on your location, business size, and industry.
Avoiding Bias in Reference Checks
A solid reference check policy will help you to avoid bias within reference checks by standardizing the questions you deliver to references. Unbiased evaluations will allow you to make advantageous hires you may have otherwise missed.
Securely Storing Reference Data
Data security is today a major concern, and your policy must accurately reflect the privacy and security practices your company employs to keep reference and candidate data safe and contained.
The Crosschq Advantage: Transforming Reference Check Policies
Crosschq’s platform is designed to improve the reference check process at all levels: from policy writing, to delivery, to data analytics. Here are a few ways Crosschq elevates a traditional reference-checking practice.
- Automated processes yield faster, more reliable feedback from higher-quality references.
- Real-time data analytics deliver insights that allow your team to make smarter hiring decisions.
- A candidate-first experience encourages positive engagement and inspires trust between the company and the future-employee.
- Crosschq’s suite of tools are all updated to reflect current compliance laws and ethical considerations.
- AI-powered platforms can scan for bias and standardize questions to eliminate problematic lines of questioning.
- Implementing the latest security features like SSO and SOC-2 audits keeps all stored data safe and secure.
Crosschq also integrates seamlessly into existing employment verification processes. There’s no need to re-invent the wheel: Crosschq’s user-friendly platform simply updates and incorporates previous practices, so you can hit the ground running after install.
Simplify Employment Verifications with Crosschq
Crosschq’s suite of tools are designed to align with your unique employment and reference check policy.
- Pre-built, customizable templates enable faster implementation.
- Seamless integrations with Applicant Tracking Systems allow you to easily pick up where you left off, with no lapse or data loss.
- Insights that transform reference data into actionable hiring intelligence empower smarter, more impactful hiring decisions.
How to Create or Update Your Policy with Crosschq
Crosschq makes creating a compliant, transparent, strategic reference checking policy simple. Here’s how it works.
Step 1: Assess your current reference check process. What are some of the things you want to maintain? Where are your opportunities for growth? What should be cut, and fast?
Step 2: Incorporate automation and analytics with Crosschq. What in your current practice are you still doing manually? What changes to labor do you need to make to integrate an automatic system?
Step 3: Ensure clarity on candidate consent and reference communication. Are your candidates reading your policy? What are ways you can improve communication between your team, the candidate, and the reference to ensure understanding and clarity for all parties?
Your Next Steps Toward Smarter Hiring
A well-defined reference check policy is a key component of successful employment verification. Having this in place keeps practices effective, compliant, and in-line with your recruiting strategy so you can make better hiring decisions with ease.
And with Crosschq in your back pocket, writing and implementing your policy takes no time. Ready to modernize your hiring? Explore Crosschq’s tools for employment verification and reference checks today.
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