Tell us about hiring at HCRG?

HCRG is a team of 5,000 professionals and experts, with hundreds of years of health service and care experience between us. HCRG are working together to change lives and transform health and care in partnership with the NHS and local authorities up and down the country.  We hire for many roles, including doctors, nurses, care assistants and office staff. Reference checks are important to our hiring process and we simply couldn’t manage it effectively when doing it manually at our scale.

Being in the healthcare industry, why are reference checks so important to you?

Reference checks are an important part of the hiring process for many organisations to gain further insight into a candidate's career history but they are especially important for regulated industries such as healthcare where hiring someone without the relevant experience can be a health risk. If you hire someone who has great references but their performance doesn’t match, it enables you to start a conversation about whether they require further support and you can dig deeper into the reasons for the discrepancies. In summary, reference checks provide a 360 view of a candidate to ensure they are meeting the required experience level for the role.

When we realised that a large portion of the work we were doing manually could be automated by a system such as RefNow we decided to book a demo to learn more about how it could help

How was HCRG doing references before using RefNow?

Everything was done manually and it was quite painful! We had to obtain email addresses for the referees by sending a form on an email, which was then followed by laborious chasing. Not to mention the tracking was very difficult and that’s something we have to be on top of in the Healthcare sector.

Referencing was one of the biggest obstacles and was consistently delaying each candidate’s time-to-hire. We have to be stringent with our checks but also fast and doing everything manually was completely counterproductive.

Why did you choose RefNow?

We looked into a number of different options for automating the referencing process and the most important features to us was the security of the data, the speed of the references being returned, and the ease of use of the system, especially with the integration to our ATS, Tribepad. RefNow scored the highest overall and we were especially impressed by the customer service team after we onboarded as they were quick to answer any questions and fix any issues with our initial setup. It’s the little things that go a long way and we really feel like a priority to everyone at RefNow!

How has RefNow improved or streamlined the referencing process for HCRG?

When we realised that a large portion of the work we were doing manually could be automated by a system such as RefNow we decided to book a demo to learn more about how it could help. Since then, it has revolutionised how quickly references come back to us, with some references being returned within minutes. On top of that, tracking is a key element as we like rich data here and we are able to pull off really detailed reports to have full visibility over our process.

How have you found the process of requesting references and tracking their progress?

After the candidate is initially added to the system, our team loves the clear report that instantly appears in our ATS without needing to do anything. We also love having access to RefNow directly as it enables us to see how many reminders have gone out to the candidates and referees to make them compliant. For example, if a candidate adds a referee but the referee hasn’t replied just yet you can see the status of how many references are pending or completed for the candidate. The audit log feature is also essential for us to provide the required evidence of attempts to collect a reference to be compliant with the CQC guidelines.

Are there any future plans for how HCRG uses RefNow?

We have recently introduced RefNow’s Digital ID checks to further reduce the onboarding timeframe which has got off to a successful start.

If you could summarise RefNow in one sentence for any other organisations in the Healthcare industry, what would you say?

I would say that it has made a positive impact in supporting our overall compliance, ensuring references are provided in a timely manner whilst being chased efficiently.