Vetting for Success with Vaco and RefAssured
In one year of using RefAssured:
Completed References
22,000
Talent Opt-Ins
4,000
Reference Completion Rate
82%
Introduction
Nothing ever slows Vaco by Highspring down.
As one of the largest and most celebrated providers of direct hire and contingent staffing services for the IT, accounting/finance, and operations industries, the company prides itself on constant innovation and delivering data-driven value for all of its clients.
Named by marquee publications as a best place to work, fastest-growing company, and best professional recruiting firm every year, Vaco leads by example in a contingent labor environment defined by increasing complexity as of late.
However, at the end of the day, there are only two things that really matter:
“It’s quality and risk,” says Kyle Allen, EVP of Business Development and Recruiting at Vaco. “Clients trust us to do two things – ensure quality talent and reduce risk of the individual not being able to do the job. If we can’t do those things, what are they paying us for?”
The Problem
It’s not hyperbole to say that hiring has essentially become a mess.
AI-generated resumes and AI editing tools have made it easier than ever for candidates to generate either fraudulent, embellished, or otherwise useless resumes that – at worst – fabricate qualifications or identities outright, or – at best – genericize skills and experience to make every job application look completely identical.
“The resume is no longer a reliable indicator of someone’s ability to do a job,” said Kyle Allen, “and we realized that in this day and age, if we were going to continue to lead the market, we needed to find a way to reduce our reliance on resumes.”
“Past performance usually dictates future performance,” Allen continued. “How can you tell that from a piece of paper? With the amount of people using AI to write resumes now, clients have never been more disappointed in the candidate quality that’s coming through the door. Resumes have never looked better, and candidates are more than happy to rinse and repeat that language in their interviews. A candidate says they ‘drove a complex IT project.’ Then you ask some questions, and based on the responses, you find out they didn’t really lead the project in any meaningful way.”
Resumes’ existential viability aside, many alternatives floating around weren’t all that compelling either, with varying degrees of relevance and ROI. Video interviews? Easy to game and favors the sweet talkers. Code tests and live skills assessments? Only relevant to a small subset of talent and turns off senior talent. Social profiles? No one is checking if they’re true.
In a tech landscape filled with gimmicks and point solutions, Vaco aimed to innovate with a true platform to provide uncommon insight. In particular, they wanted to implement a solution to support their efforts around continuing to lead the hiring landscape, and to do it in a way that could speed up the placement lifecycle.
The obvious form factor to achieve this was reference checking – a classic recruiting staple that Vaco identified had huge room for modernization. Want to know who someone really is? Ask a real person who worked with them and give them permission to be honest.
Kyle Allen
Executive Vice President
Vaco by Highspring
“RefAssured helps us tell a story of why this individual is a fit for the job, not just check a box of yes/no. We are helping our clients understand why a person can be successful, and we are validating that recommendation with proven past performance data. It is the science of good quality data and it is the art of human judgment combined. And it’s about keeping up our end of the bargain – which is high quality, low risk – and making clients happy.”
The Solution
The Vaco team, led by Allen’s colleagues Leslie Cobb-Hector, Beth Hair, and Ryan Thompson, evaluated a series of reference checking solutions. The team aimed to find a solution that could meet the standards Vaco had continuously set with clients by quickly and thoughtfully surfacing insight on candidate past performance to answer two critical questions: 1) can this applicant do the job, and 2) how well can they do it? The RefAssured platform was found to best align with this objective, in particular with its automation, lead generation, and workflow optimization capabilities in addition to the bread-and-butter ability to answer those two questions.
“Past performance tells the real story,” said Kyle Allen. “Resumes do not. Recruiters scan a resume in 10 seconds, a hiring manager gives it maybe 60 seconds, it leads to a quick point-in-time interview. We knew there had to be a better way, and that way was RefAssured.”
Upon choosing RefAssured, the next step was building a business case for enterprise-wide adoption, and creatively navigating large staffing companies’ biggest internal technology challenge: change management.
The Vaco team started with a pilot rollout of RefAssured to five offices in early 2024. Their goal was to integrate the solution into Vaco’s existing processes, quickly generate ROI, and prove that recruiters would love the solution, find it easy to use, and start seeing material data-driven improvements to placement velocity and client satisfaction. The strength of this test case would put the entire org’s recruiters at ease around the value and benefit that the Vaco and RefAssured partnership would provide.
And that’s exactly how it played out.
The Result
The pilot program yielded an 82% reference completion rate, 230 new sales opt-in warm leads, and more than 1,000 new qualified candidates from the reference-giver pool. The reference turnaround time was reduced to just 26 hours.
And any initial objections to the concept of reference checks were quickly overcome when Vaco’s recruiters saw firsthand the well-designed, staffing-centric, and thoughtful way that RefAssured’s reference questionnaires were built and could seamlessly integrate into existing processes.
“Some recruiters say, ‘no one gives a bad reference,’” said Allen. “But that’s simply not true. I always provide honest references, and RefAssured’s questionnaires make it easy to be candid without being unkind. It’s entirely appropriate to say, ‘I think highly of this person – they excel in these areas, but are less strong in others.’ If those gaps happen to matter for a specific role, it’s better to catch that early. That way, everyone’s on the same page, including the candidate, and we can help steer them toward something that’s a better fit, while saving the client time, money, and potential frustration.”
Additionally, while incremental efficiency improvements and cost reductions are valuable to staffing agencies, reducing the dollars out on wasted resources and labor costs is only one half of the picture for what a firm needs to really grow and thrive. The other half is dollars in. Revenue. Predictable, sustainable, upward trajectory revenue.
And that’s another area where Vaco and RefAssured have delivered huge ROI, around facilitating automatic talent and sales lead generation that allows interested candidates and prospective clients to opt in and create an evergreen revenue flywheel that gets stronger the more the platform is used.
“The more people we’re talking to, the more successful we’ll be,” said Ryan Thompson, VP of Talent Systems and Operations at Vaco, who helped lead the original pilot and resulting enterprise-wide implementation of RefAssured. “RefAssured’s lead opt-ins and reference-giver database help us not only better serve folks who want to use our services, but also network with people who may be ready later and convert them into a candidate or client. It’s a full circle deal and it’s proven to be a powerful revenue driver for us.”
In just the past year, enterprise-wide, Vaco has completed more than 22,000 reference checks with an 82% completion rate and 26-hour average turnaround time. The Vaco and RefAssured partnership has generated 400 new warm sales leads and an astonishing 4,000 new talent leads for Vaco.
Final Thoughts
RefAssured’s automated reference checking solution has been deployed across the entire enterprise and integrated into Vaco’s award-winning solutions, and the Vaco team is excited to evaluate RefAssured’s post-hire performance evaluations solution to continue improving their redeployment rates, and RefAssured’s embedded fraud prevention solution for identity verification, powered by ID.me.
“Fraud is a huge issue,” added Kyle Allen. “It’s always existed, but never at this level – never this brazen or constant. We owe it to our clients to make sure the talent we submit is genuinely qualified and someone they’ll actually enjoy working with. As we’ve learned from our clients, culture fit is just as important as technical fit. We may not have done every job we recruit for, but we know how to evaluate people well. It’s not about a quick 30-minute chat and a simple test, then handing someone off and saying, ‘Here you go.’ With RefAssured, we can give clients additional confidence in their hiring decisions, and that’s what keeps those relationships strong.”
Allen continued: “RefAssured helps us tell a story of why this individual is a fit for the job, not just check a box of yes/no. We are helping our clients understand why a person can be successful, and we are validating that recommendation with proven past performance data. It is the science of good quality data and it is the art of human judgment combined. And it’s about keeping up our end of the bargain – which is high quality, low risk – and making clients happy.”
The Vaco team is excited to grow their partnership with RefAssured and invest in additional RefAssured products to continue innovating within and optimizing their recruiting lifecycle, unlocking additional sources of revenue from improved redeployment rates. The consistency of the data and analytics that RefAssured provides will make measuring the ROI of these future investments very easy to track.
But amidst all this talk of number crunching and business intelligence, staffing always comes down to relationships and trust, noted Thompson, which is the ultimate value RefAssured provides.
“It takes years to build client trust and seconds to lose it through laziness or cutting corners. What are you doing to continually maintain trust with your clients?”
About Vaco by Highspring
Vaco is the Talent Solutions division of Highspring, a leading global professional services organization. With expertise in Accounting and Finance, Technology and Digital, and Human Resources and Operations, Vaco provides Contract Staffing and Direct Hire solutions. Vaco’s parent company, Highspring, helps clients with two additional integrated service offerings: Consulting and Managed Services. With more than 10,000 employees across more than 45 offices worldwide, Highspring gives partners the agility to thrive, address challenges, and seize opportunities in a rapidly changing world. Get to know us at vaco.com.
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See how leading staffing agencies prevent fraud, protect trust, redeploy talent faster, and turn every reference check into revenue growth.
- Detect candidate fraud before placementwith seamless identity verification
- 12-hour average turnaroundon completed references with science-backed surveys
- Capture post-hire performance insightsfor redeployment, compliance, and better bill rates
- Go live in under 48 hourswith native integrations for Bullhorn, Salesforce, JobDiva, and more
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