Care, communicate, compete, celebrate, consistently.

Those are the Five Cs, or core values, that guide the internal workings of Talon Professional Services and explain why the IT and professional staffing agency has won ClearlyRated’s Best of Staffing Talent Award for ten years running and has a client NPS rating of 76%.

Quality is a non-negotiable for the company, part of the unwritten social contract it maintains with its clients and its highly sought-after skilled talent.

Joe Kelly, Talon’s Chief Operating Officer, explains the importance of the company’s internal values as a set of principles that drive its actions and behaviors: “Talon has our Talon C5, which is our business mantra of how we want to do business and how we want to act in the marketplace. And the first one is care. We want our clients to know that we care about them. We want our candidates to know that we care about them. That, for us, is paramount.”

Talon had long believed in the power of reference checking and validating talent quality, but they didn’t have the right solutions in place to grow their vetted talent pipeline. As their focus is on placing highly skilled professional and IT talent, submitting top-tier candidates to clients, and then leveraging that talent’s connections to grow their roster of candidates, was of critical importance.

What led us to RefAssured was the desire to really understand if our talent could do the job or not. We needed actual data to validate the capabilities and quality of the candidates we were placing, not just gut feeling or instinct.”

Joe KellyChief Operating Officer, Talon Professional Services

While RefAssured’s ability to provide a scorecard for soft skills, hard skills, and attributes via automated reference checking was what initially drew Talon to its solutions, it was the company’s candidate opt-in capability that made the partnership a no-brainer.

“Our talent pipeline is our revenue pipeline, like it is with most staffing agencies. We evaluated RefAssured and saw the warm candidate opt-in capabilities built into the reference checking process, and we realized we could populate our database with the peers and managers of our vetted, proven talent who are also vetted and proven, and grow our pipeline without doing anything. It would all write back into our ATS automatically, and that just felt like something we had to have.”

Another variable associated with the urgency around a solution for candidate opt-ins was a changing landscape for IT and professional talent.

“We have a real talent shortage,” said Kelly. “Baby Boomers have retired, H-1B visas are declining, and more and more skilled talent is feeling disengaged from a recruiting process that makes them jump through hoops.”

Enter RefAssured.

Talon went live on RefAssured and surprisingly encountered no recruiter resistance to moving from a manual reference checking solution to an automated one.

Kelly remarked: “Our salespeople have other responsibilities that I’d prefer for them to be concentrating on rather than calling to do reference checks, which is time consuming, hard to do well, and variable. RefAssured can handle this for us and take all of that off of their plates and just provide them with great information that they can use to go sell those candidates to the client rather than spending the time and doing the reference checks themselves. It’s been such an upgrade for the sales team.”

He continued: “Good talent these days is hard to find and has a lot of options. The ‘great stay’ is real. We have to prioritize the candidate experience in order to win over this discerning talent. That means a process that is as fast and easy and painless as possible so that the best candidates want to work with you, and show excitement and enthusiasm for the position and for your client. RefAssured knows that and has designed its solution to be a win for the candidate, client, and recruiter alike.”

Kelly and the team at Talon have also been excited about the structured insight that RefAssured’s technology gathers and writes back into their ATS, which takes the place of other forms of candidate intelligence.

“LinkedIn is a great tool,” said Kelly, “but let’s face it, it’s all information that’s provided by the candidate, right? There’s no validation in LinkedIn. You know, there’s nothing that tells us, hey, this person really is who they say they are and really has the skills that they say they have. So RefAssured being able to provide that intelligence for us and write it back into Bullhorn automatically helps our speed to fill, because it helps recruiters get the candidates through the funnel faster.”

Kelly also explained how doing RefAssured reference checks pre-submittal has accelerated placement velocity across the board, and set up a smoother runway for redeployment. “It’s not just about the initial reference check for a candidate that we’re submitting to a client. It’s having that information going forward too, so that next time we have a similar role, it’s easier and faster to get to the better candidates because we already have information that tells us that they are who they say they are and that they have those skills. Based on that, their last supervisor told us how great they were in the position before. A lot of people look at the reference checks as an end of funnel process, and it might be for the initial time that you run them for that candidate. But then after that, it helps at the top of the funnel because now you have that information and you can get to those candidates quicker because you already know who the better ones are.”

And RefAssured’s renowned implementation process won them a lot of fast fans at Talon. “RefAssured’s implementations are really something else,” said Kelly. “They’re fast, they met with us constantly, and they asked for feedback on the product and then evolved the feature set based on that feedback. And they do that with all their customers. I think in the modern day we’ve gotten used to being sold to by a vendor and then they disappear and say ‘see ya! Thanks for the check!’. But not RefAssured. They’re committed to us and to helping us succeed and to making their product better and better. Our first core value is care, and RefAssured gets it. They really, really care about their customers. It shows.”

With RefAssured, Talon has cut its submission-to-sendout ratio in half, which means that the quality of the candidates getting sent to their clients has increased. And on the other half of the funnel, Talon’s sendout-to-interview percentage has doubled, and its interview-to-placement percentage has also doubled.

What does this all mean? Thanks to RefAssured, Talon is able to submit fewer candidates to clients but of a higher caliber. These candidates are getting more interviews with clients, more offers, and they’re getting hired. So Talon is growing their placement revenue and their client satisfaction by submitting better talent at the outset.

“That’s all the proof you need, right?” said Kelly. “The numbers just don’t lie. I don’t need to have lengthy conversations with clients to prove out that RefAssured is working, because those ratios are insane. We’ve further increased the quality of the candidates we’re presenting, and we’re placing more talent than ever.”

And while it wasn’t an urgent priority at the time that Talon first selected RefAssured for its performance intelligence, fraud has now risen to the top of the list of challenges the agency needs to address. And RefAssured has become a crucial weapon in their arsenal of fraud detection and mitigation solutions.

“Fraud has become so common and such a pervasive problem that we can really only hope to drastically reduce it versus eliminating it altogether,” said Kelly. “There are two primary types of fraud. The first is that the person isn’t who they claim to be. The second is that they’re a real person, but they don’t have the skill set they claim to have. Solving for both requires an intelligent approach.”

Talon has used RefAssured reference checking to validate a candidate’s skill set, ability to do a job, and to identify obvious identity fraud flags, alongside a series of other overt fraud detection solutions. However, with the recent release of RefAssured’s new Protect fraud detection solution, that analyzes dozens of fraud signals on both candidates and their reference-givers, Talon is examining novel ways to scaffold its fraud prevention capabilities.

“There are other products that RefAssured offers that we’re not yet utilizing that I’m looking forward to adding. One is post-hire performance evaluations, because that’s more information we can add to our candidate record inside of Bullhorn that will enable our recruiters to redeploy those candidates faster. Another is Protect, because the ability to identify not just fraudulent candidates, but fraudulent reference-givers, is huge. A candidate might be real, but if their reference-givers are fake, you know they’re covering up something big.”

Also, amidst a lumpy several years for the IT and professional staffing segments, Talon has not only continued to win awards for its client service, satisfaction, and culture, but also is an industry leader in growth.

Kelly stated: “Talon’s goal in 2026 was to grow. And we’ve had a great year so far, with double digit year-over-year growth. It’s been an amazing year for us, and a lot of that is attributed to the recruiting team being able to deliver better candidates to our clients and being able to validate that these candidates are who they say they are, and that they can do the job they say they can, and that they’re real and have the skills they say they have. You cannot overstate the value of that data, of that insight, that RefAssured provides.”

“We implemented RefAssured because we consider it our obligation to continually raise the bar when it comes to serving our candidates and our clients,” said Kelly. “We are in the business of getting better, every year, no resting on our laurels.”

And that implementation, and now with months of data behind the success of it, has underscored the importance of approaching a technology vendor-agency relationship as a continuing partnership that grows with time, the exact way that Talon approaches its relationships with clients and talent.

“A laser focus on quality should not be novel in this industry,” he continues. “A lot of the things we do, in my mind, are table stakes. You can’t pass go without these things, right? If you asked any staffing client, our competitors’ clients, et cetera, if they expect that their staffing provider is doing reference checks on their candidates and vetting the quality of these candidates and validating their skills, they would all say ‘of course.’ Of course they expect their staffing firm to be vetting the talent they submit to them. It’s not like one staffing firm should be better than another in this regard, literally everyone should be doing it.”