The longer you wait to identify candidate fraud in your recruiting funnel, the more you lose – client relationships, revenue, trust, and efficiency. All of it goes unless you identify fraud at the top of the funnel.
They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Do you want to prevent fraud using the intelligence, insight, and quality validation that a scalable and unobtrusive reference checking process provides, or do you want to explain to a client why you screened and submitted a threat actor as part of your finalist slate and didn’t catch it until two days before her start date?
A candidate fraud solution that works
The solution that RefAssured has introduced with ID.me is long overdue for staffing agencies, who have up to this point had to rely either on background check providers for identity verification (which means catching fraudulent candidates immediately before placement) or third-party ID verification providers that only validate information outside of their core systems.
It’s very tempting to say that reference checking is akin to fixing a cracked foundation of your house – something that is important but not urgent, as your house is still standing (for now). It might feel more urgent to respond if your house was actively on fire, for instance. But the reality is that a cracked foundation is only easy to ignore until a big rainstorm hits, your entire ground floor floods, and you lose a lot.
The reality is that you cannot decouple identity verification from recruiting hygiene, of which reference checking is a foundational component. Staffing agencies have two primary jobs for their clients: assuming the burden of risk, and placing the best talent on assignment. It is the combination of advanced identity verification at the top of the funnel and reference checking conducted pre-submittal that allows both of these to happen.
AI alone can’t stop candidate fraud, but it may cause it
Modern hiring involves an overwhelming amount of noise, and it’s exhausting for recruiters, candidates, and clients alike. Candidates use GenAI to create or edit resumes to the point that the information is no longer unique or reliable, and it’s easier than ever to use deepfakes and other technologies to perpetrate outright fraud. In response, many staffing agencies have turned to AI agents for candidate screening, but these agents are easy to circumvent and fool, and are designed to prioritize speed over quality and comprehensiveness. That means they’re not really screening out the bad actors; they’re just pushing them through the recruiting pipeline quickly to embellish a vanity metric.
“Move fast and break things,” as they say. That’s all good for an AI company trying to triple their growth overnight but not particularly good for your staffing agency’s revenue retention, relationships, or reputation.
Why fraud prevention and reference checking go hand in hand
Reference checking isn’t a check-the-box exercise when it’s done the way that RefAssured has designed it. It’s a means of measuring how well someone can do a job based on the validated, 100% human assessment of people who have worked with a candidate in the past and can vouch for their soft skills, hard skills, attributes, and any red flags. And it takes seconds to launch and 12 hours to complete and be ready for client presentation. Because RefAssured reference checking is built into the placement lifecycle pre-submittal, unqualified candidates don’t make it to your talent pools. We embed fraud prevention when it matters most – before any damage can be done.
The combination of ID verification and reference checking is a one-two punch. Confirm that this person is who they say they are, and then prove to your client that they can do the job well and to what degree. And then on top of that, grow your staffing agency through warm, automatic sales and talent lead generation, improved sub-to-hire, better operational efficiency, and millions of dollars in placement revenue. Pay back the cost of the RefAssured platform in two months and go live in 48 hours. If you stop calling our reference checking solution “reference checking” and start thinking of it as a simple way to answer the question, “is the candidate competent?” it makes a lot more sense to have these two solutions inextricably intertwined.
And with the full RefAssured platform, you can determine:
- 1) is this person real? (pre-hire fraud prevention powered by ID.me)
- 2) is this person capable? (pre-hire automated reference checking)
- 3) based on how well they did, can we quickly redeploy them and generate new revenue from their skills? (post-hire automated performance evaluations)