The Challenge

Macroeconomic uncertainty has made the focus on relationships that Atlas provides even more meaningful and imperative.  

“When things are crazy on a macro level,” says Biddle, “you have to look at optimizing the micro. How do you take every traveler’s experience and make it special? We know that if we don’t get a candidate placed, it will really impact their lives in a bad way. That’s why the technology we use has to be truly solid, and it has to make things easier for humans. Every step in the process has to be optimized internally, externally, and everywhere in-between.” 

While the team at Atlas already understood the importance of reference checks as a marker of hiring quality and mandatory compliance requirements, the process by which they collected these references was highly manual and varied depending on the individual preferences of the recruiter collecting them. And in an industry where objectivity is paramount, that just wasn’t good enough. 

Looking to streamline the reference collection and completion lifecycle, Atlas turned first to a RefAssured competitor, but quickly realized that this solution had a lot of problems. 

First, this competitor provided a pricing structure that was predicated on candidate reference credits, and allocated a certain number of credits annually for Atlas to use within a 12-month expiration window. This limited the volume and scale at which Atlas could operate, as they’d have to continually conform their candidate pipeline to the credit allocation available at any given moment, which was problematic for any type of staffing business for which placements fluctuate.  

Second, for Atlas, which uses the popular Bullhorn ATS/CRM as their applicant tracking system of record, a lack of native integration between their reference checking solution and Bullhorn made for less optimal recruiter experience, requiring double authentication and creating occasional points of process friction. While the two systems did integrate, it was difficult for the incumbent solution to see “opt-ins” and accurately track and manage credits.  

Third, at the time, the competitor solution lacked out-of-the-box text messaging capabilities. With candidates expecting a mobile-first user experience and travelers especially being tethered to their mobile devices, this was a significant limitation and oversight. 

The Results 

In the first five months of going live with RefAssured, Atlas MedStaff has completed 5,244 references from 2,084 candidates, with an all-time low average completion time of 2 days. While Atlas has no shortage of client opportunities due to the high percentage of its business that flows through vendor management systems (VMS), the team is always on the lookout for new traveler candidates, and thanks to RefAssured’s lead generation capabilities, has seen 444 net new candidate opt-ins. That’s 75 candidate leads per month that Atlas likely wouldn’t have seen without using RefAssured. 

Additionally – unlike with their previous solution which generated a new report for every reference, in a cumbersome workflow – with RefAssured, each candidate’s references are compiled into a single report.  

Joel Wiersma is excited about the results they’ve already seen from the RefAssured partnership: “In healthcare staffing, references are an absolute must. With RefAssured, we have a streamlined way to address this requirement that also improves the experience for our team and our travelers.” 

Aaron Biddle is especially pleased with the collaboration between the respective teams. “RefAssured clearly stands out among the technology vendors we work with. With RefAssured, customer feedback is important, heard, and acted on immediately.”