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.
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:
The Crosschq platform helps to uplift these three essential components with modern programming that reflects the current best practices within recruiting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whatever vertical you’re operating in, there are a few key components you must include in your reference check 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Crosschq’s suite of tools are designed to align with your unique employment and reference check policy.
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?
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.