Fraud is everywhere, and it’s easier than ever to commit at scale. 84% of HR and hiring managers and 76% of staffing recruiters say candidate fraud is more common today than it was three years ago, and 98% of HR and hiring managers and 95% of staffing recruiters have personally caught a candidate misrepresenting their qualifications, experience, or identity.
And while there are a lot of fraud solutions out there to choose from, they are a) generally extremely expensive, b) not built for staffing-specific workflows, and c) only work on a subset of individuals who actually perpetrate fraud.
We thought there was a better way to solve for fraud in staffing, and that’s why we built RefAssured Protect.
Protect delivers fraud detection screening on everyone who needs it, at scale. It integrates with the RefAssured products our customers already use, and lives inside staffing ATS and front office systems, so you simplify and streamline your tech stack while being more efficient with your vendor spend.
Why it’s different:
Most fraud detection focuses on just the candidate, and just once. But candidate fraud doesn’t end with the candidate. The reality is that a candidate can look perfectly legitimate while their reference-givers paint a completely different picture.
Having a means of identifying and analyzing signals – and combinations of signals – that are highly suggestive of fraud that works not only on candidates but also on their reference-givers is a one-two punch that is incredibly difficult for even the most enterprising of fraudsters to sidestep.
You may be asking why. Well it’s simple, really.
It’s easier than ever to steal or manufacture an identity, but fake personas cannot stand up to real human insight. A fraudster might be able to fake their identity, or use AI to fumble through an interview or skill test. That’s pretty easy. But with RefAssured Protect, they need to do more than just pass a simple check – they need to produce multiple convincing personas in various places, and their references, work histories, relationships, attributes, and past successes all need to hold together under scrutiny. We put fraudsters on the back foot.
Protect examines not just a candidate’s identity, but their history, personality, connections, and performance qualities – alongside hundreds of technical signals – to flag suspicious patterns and expose fraud. We go on offense in order to put fraudulent candidates on defense, and in doing so we protect legitimate talent, your revenue and reputation, and your client’s business health. RefAssured Protect is full-funnel fraud prevention that runs on trust.
And because Protect, like all RefAssured solutions, lives natively within major ATSes and integrates seamlessly with any ATS in existence, all the information you need to see writes back into a candidate record automatically.
Here are three more features of Protect that we find really exciting, and very much purpose-built for staffing agencies:
You can run Protect screens on candidates and reference-givers as many times during the recruiting lifecycle as you want, and it’s completely unobtrusive. They won’t be disturbed, they don’t need to take any action, and it takes less than a minute. And if any fraud signals come up that raise suspicion without feeling conclusive, you can ask the candidate to actively verify their identity using our integration with ID.me that we announced last year. While that’s an active step that requires candidate approval, and not a passive screen, at least you know it’s warranted.
You won’t scare top talent away. Kind of a Catch-22 situation where remote IT roles carry a high fraud incidence but also involve highly sought-after, technical talent who doesn’t love to jump through hoops (who does, to be fair?) If you want to keep the best talent engaged and enthusiastic, you need to create a comfortable experience for them while protecting your agency’s reputation and that of your client. That’s what Protect allows – because it requires no action or knowledge on the part of the candidate or reference-giver, you don’t have to put talent through extra steps or make them feel like they’re burning cycles to get a job.
You can decouple it from reference checking if you really need to. If you want to run a Protect screen on any candidate in your ATS and you don’t already use RefAssured’s reference checking product, that’s fine. You can buy Protect standalone. It’s not nearly as effective as the combination of Protect and reference checking, since you can’t run Protect on reference-givers if there are no reference-givers. But if fraud is your only problem and quality is not, we can get you started on Protect by itself.
Finally, while there are a bunch of interesting and productive fraud detection and prevention solutions on the market right now, none are purpose-built for staffing the way RefAssured Protect is. The combination of validation, ease of use, and (let’s call a spade a spade here) an accessible price point is part of our mission to do right by the staffing industry and build the software we wish we had access to when we worked a desk.
Early testers of Protect have seen their incidence of pre-submittal candidate fraud go from double-digit percentages down to zero. We’ve spent a long time calibrating Protect and it works very, very well. This is especially important as fraud starts to materially affect more than just IT and professional segments. We’ve had healthcare staffing agencies come to us with complaints of fraudulent clinical talent or clinicians committing reference fraud to obfuscate ethical impropriety. It’s critical that staffing agencies in all sectors realize that fraud can – and likely will – happen to them.
The time to Protect your agency, revenue, legitimate talent, and client relationships is now.
