Lloyd Staffing Turns Third-Party Candidate Vetting into a Unique Competitive Advantage
In 1 year of using RefAssured:
Candidate Completion Rate
84%
Hours Saved
900
Talent Opt-In Rate
15%
Introduction:
For Melissa Matos, CSP, the VP of Operations at Lloyd Staffing who is entering her 24th year with the agency, there is nothing more important than the reputation Lloyd has with their clients.
Melissa started her career as a recruiter before the time of ubiquitous digitization and AI. A time when authentic communication and establishing rapport with candidates and clients was the only way to get things done effectively, and sloppy unforced errors would be the death knell of any profitable relationship.
As a result, she is simply allergic to cheap shortcuts that jeopardize the trust that real human beings place in her and her colleagues.
She and her team at Lloyd have set a new standard for staffing excellence by turning delivery of high-quality, vetted, thoroughly capable talent into the agency’s secret (or at this point, not so secret), value proposition. Amidst a sea of competitors who treat reference checks as a box-ticking exercise, or write off identity fraud as an inconvenient reality, Lloyd stands apart by genuinely doing the right thing for clients, always protecting the integrity of their talent pipeline, and investing in solutions that declare these values loudly and do so in their stakeholders’ best interest.
“We’ve always prided ourselves on doing our due diligence,” said Matos. “We have honor and act with care and our clients realize that. It’s why we have such loyal relationships and why we’ve continued to grow in size and scope.”
The Challenge:
As the truest of true recruiting professionals, the team at Lloyd Staffing has always conducted reference checks. To submit unvetted talent would be anathema to them. However, several years ago, the agency realized that running these checks manually was simply taking too much time and returning results more slowly and in a less structured and actionable way than desired. And most importantly, because they were conducting these references themselves, the team worried that they might not seem fully above board and objective.
“We did manual references for a long time,” said Matos. “And at the end of the day, we’re in sales. Everyone in the staffing industry is a salesperson, regardless of their function. We realized that being able to tell our clients that our references were third-party verified and conducted would paint us in a much more positive light and make the information we submitted much more trustworthy. If our clients knew that a third party conducted a thorough reference check of former colleagues selected by a candidate, not our recruiter, then it wouldn’t be Lloyd trying to push a deal through, but rather a credible process that really benefits the client.”
Matos continued: “With our manual reference process, we couldn’t verify any information collected by our recruiters because it was done in every which way, and when a recruiter left it was even tougher to track down answers. We confirmed that references were done, but there was no documentation in our ATS, and then what’s the point?”
Melissa Matos, CSP
VP of Operations
Lloyd Staffing
“We market ourselves as working with RefAssured because it makes us look better. It justifies our competitive bill rates. If we provide only the best talent, and we can prove it, our margins will be higher and clients will be glad to pay for that peace of mind.”
The Solution:
Lloyd then embarked on the process of evaluating third-party automated reference checking providers, and quickly landed on RefAssured as the obvious choice for them.
Matos commented: “I’ll be honest, I don’t remember any other vendor we looked at besides RefAssured. There was nothing about any other vendor that stuck out to me. They all seemed lightweight and not particularly relevant to us as a staffing agency. But RefAssured seemed so thoughtful and their solution was so feature-rich. It was very clear to us quickly who we wanted to partner with.”
“RefAssured fit perfectly within our workflow,” said Matos. “It worked beautifully from the very start. And because it was set in a different platform that integrated with our own, we could always go back and verify and analyze candidate insights independently.”
In particular, the team at Lloyd was drawn to RefAssured’s powerful analytics, speed, and deliverability tracking, which allowed them to have control over how quickly a vetting process was moving and prevent placement slowdowns. “It’s user-friendly for the candidate and it’s user-friendly for us,” said Matos. “On our end, it’s very easy to view the results of the reference check, get alerts on when we’re not getting responses and then we can reach out to the candidate to nudge the process along. With RefAssured we don’t have to worry about losing a placement because a reference is pending. And our clients know that unlike other staffing agencies, we’re not going to submit someone without a reference just to win the placement at the ultimate expense of the client.”
Because so much of a staffing agency’s reputation is built upon keeping its word and delivering high quality and low risk to its clients, Matos and her fellow leaders were laser-focused on providing evidence-based hiring recommendations as opposed to simply presenting candidates they liked for opaque reasons. They were drawn to RefAssured’s performance intelligence scorecarding capabilities to allow them to show their clients who they should be hiring with real data on soft skills, hard skills, and attribute ratings, not just vague suggestions.
“Our biggest competitive advantage is our own system of checks and balances,” said Matos. “Making sure that our team is not just providing a service but is validating that service with documentation. And having it write back into our system of record makes it even easier to track what’s working, and how well. With RefAssured, they’re such a respected team and such a flexible solution in terms of workflow that almost all of the vendors we worked with said either ‘we integrate with RefAssured already’ or ‘we want to partner with their product.’ It feels very much to me like there is a wave of momentum behind RefAssured and it’s obvious we made the right decision at the right time.”
The Results:
Reference checks that used to take reference-givers more than a week to respond to manually now take these reference-givers 23 hours on average with RefAssured. The usability of the solution, and the fact that intake and reference questionnaires can be completed via email or mobile, has been transformational both from a time-to-completion perspective and also for fostering a positive candidate experience.
“We serve candidates from many walks of life,” said Matos. “Some are recent retirees pursuing professional work on a contract basis, some may be re-entering the workforce, across the many segments we serve. Not everyone has the same comfort level sitting down at a computer, and in this day and age, having a mobile-first vetting solution has been game-changing.”
So game-changing, in fact, that Lloyd has become an evangelist for RefAssured, purchasing the company’s new candidate fraud prevention solution powered by ID.me and branding the combination of automated reference checking and fraud prevention from RefAssured as “Lloyd Verified.” The team promotes their Lloyd Verified program to customers and prospects to show that by partnering with Lloyd, these customers are getting access to not only vetted, top-quality talent, but also eliminating the possibility of candidate fraud and performance fabrication. And the best part of it is that these clients are working with a staffing supplier who cares enough about them to not leave fraud checks until the background phase of the placement process.
“It’s part of our company policy to use RefAssured to vet candidates and prevent fraud,” said Matos. “And it is company policy to complete RefAssured references before a candidate is even submitted. The fact that we are validating, confirming, and maintaining that trust level on a candidate and that this insight comes from a credible third party just puts us in a totally different category as a staffing agency for our clients. RefAssured has helped us win more business and grow our client relationships because we’ve been able to cultivate and build that trust.”
That said, the decision to use RefAssured’s fraud prevention wasn’t entirely proactive.
Matos explained: “Unfortunately we were caught in the middle of a fraud. It wasn't our fraud, but we were part of a client process and it was the candidate that was potentially going to work who was on a cyber security threat list. It was something the average background check, the average I-9 would not have caught. We knew we needed to use RefAssured to prevent something like this from happening again.”
The team then went live on RefAssured’s candidate fraud prevention solution powered by ID.me. Matos continued: “RefAssured’s fraud prevention solution adds an extra layer of protection in real time with biometric verification, liveliness checks, and an easy candidate experience since so many people already have ID.me. This is a uniquely comprehensive and impactful solution. And that unfortunate situation that spurred us to look at fraud prevention solutions in the first place motivated us to start looking at several vendors. But knowing what we already knew about the quality of the RefAssured automated reference checking platform, we trusted that the fraud prevention solution would be just as good, and we were right.”
Final Thoughts:
In addition to having recently purchased RefAssured’s candidate fraud prevention solution as well as being longtime users of its automated reference checking product, Lloyd is also in the process of moving to a new applicant tracking system with which RefAssured already has longstanding and powerful native integrations.
While the technical and workflow integrations will continue to bear fruit for the agency and help them brand Lloyd Verified as a unique competitive advantage and revenue driver, the team at Lloyd is most eager to collaborate with RefAssured on future product development and industry best practice knowledge sharing.
“We see each others as true partners, Lloyd and RefAssured,” said Matos. “When they tell us they’re working on a new product, and ask us to check it out, we’re delighted to experience it, and delighted to learn from it. They’re so much more than a vendor to us because we learn from each other. We were so impressed from day one with the quality of their team and how well they understand what we need as an agency to not just exist but to grow and thrive and be competitive in this new world of work.”
Matos continued: “I manage our recruiters who use RefAssured day in and day out. I have seen firsthand how easy it was for our candidates and recruiters to use the platform, and how much our clients value and rely on the RefAssured reports. So often we have clients that meet a candidate and they like them, but want to see more people. So we work on that, but also say ‘here’s the reference report on the candidate you loved.’ And I can’t tell you how many times that’s made the decision move faster. And with prospects, we’ve used the anonymized reports for candidate marketing and presentation. Showcasing the caliber of talent that they will receive if they partner with us is a powerful way to win them over quickly.”
Partnering with RefAssured has also had a positive impact on Lloyd’s candidate relationships, and the loyalty of their top talent – who are in high demand for AI, engineering, creative, marketing, HR, finance, IT, accounting, and other sought-after professional segments. Candidates enjoy the reference checking and ID verification process because it is both unobtrusive and dignified, and they view it as a means of self-advocacy and better marketing.
“With the help of the RefAssured team we’ve been able to communicate the advantages that this system provides for candidates,” said Matos. “This process protects them, it makes them more marketable to clients, it prevents fraud in a remote world in which it’s become amplified.”
And for clients, the impact of Lloyd Verified has been crucial in setting Lloyd apart from competitors who cut corners, protecting Lloyd’s wallet share and revenue with existing customers, and creating opportunities for them to operate at higher bill rates for their strong talent pool.
“The last thing you want to do is present a candidate who isn’t fully vetted,” said Matos. “We are in the staffing industry. Literally the most important part of our job is to fully vet candidates. We need to prevent fraud, validate that the candidate is who they say they are, prove that they can do the job and will do it well. On the flip side, if you don’t verify their identity or references, and you submit them as this great candidate with a resume, interview notes, and recording, and then they either fail the background check or go on assignment with huge red flags, what does that do to your credibility with the client? Would they ever trust you again? Why should they?”
Matos concludes: “We need to level up the service we provide as an industry. We need to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. We need to screen these candidates with methods they cannot go around or fool. Do the references, verify their identity, don’t trust resumes and video interviews in a remote world. Eliminating risk early not only shows the client that you’re the real deal, it also relieves a tremendous burden on the agency. We market ourselves as working with RefAssured because it makes us look better. It justifies our competitive bill rates. If we provide only the best talent, and we can prove it, our margins will be higher and clients will be glad to pay for that peace of mind.”
About Lloyd Staffing
LLoyd Staffing is a trusted leader in direct hire, consulting and temporary/contract workforce solutions in key practice disciplines. We are a recruiting firm and temporary staffing agency that provides responsive service and innovative recruitment expertise to employers seeking to build impact. We offer guidance and placement to professionals looking for an amazing new position to meet their career needs. But LLoyd’s overall impact is not about us – it’s about the impact on the talent we engage, recruit and refer to our client partners and how this talent then impacts their workforces, drives performance and builds revenue. Companies and highly specialized talent trust LLoyd because we are dedicated to knowing our people and retaining them in our pipeline. This commitment is what makes us an industry-leading staffing and executive recruiting firm.
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