Managing employment reference requests is one of the most time-consuming jobs for any HR Department. For those with safeguarding obligations, new employees cannot start work until all checks are complete. So, delays in collecting employment reference requests can affect an employee start date.

Finding new staff members is hard enough, so getting them into work quickly is a priority. Your ATS should help you as much as possible.

In this blog, we’ll take a look at the key features an ATS should offer.

Creating Your Own Referee Record

It’s important for employers in Care, Education and some other sectors to keep an accurate record of each referee in addition to returned references. If there are future disciplinary issues, you may need to return to them.

Your ATS should help you copy a referee directly from a jobseeker’s application. You can complete any outstanding information, correct a typo in an email address and so on.

Applicants sometimes provide referee details later in the recruitment cycle. They can arrive by email, phone or post. Your ATS should allow you to create referee record from these sources.

Employment Reference Request Templates

Your ATS should send personalised reference requests quickly and conveniently. It should let you build reference request templates and include merge fields. Merge fields populate the applicant name, referee details, job details and other information automatically when sending the request. Here you can find an example employment reference request template with merge fields.

Reference Documents

When preparing your reference request, you may wish to attach some standard documents. These could include a confidentiality statement, your data protection policy, or safeguarding statement. If you do, your ATS should offer a secure place to store them for easy access. Click-attaching documents is more convenient and more accurate than searching for them in a local directory structure.

Send Your Employment Reference Request

Once sent, reviewing the ongoing status of your employment reference requests should be easy. Your ATS should help you track these. It should know when reference requests were sent, because most should be sent via your ATS. But, there will always be cases where reference requests were made outside of your ATS. It should help you track these too. As references are returned, you’ll want to uptick the status to show that they have been received and reviewed. Only once a reference has been reviewed should you close it for any further action.

Where is an Employment Reference Returned?

Most HR teams monitor a central email address such as hr@yourcompany.com. It shouldn’t matter who makes the request. Your ATS should make sure that replies go to that inbox.

Employment Checks

Employment reference requests may be just one of your jobs when completing employment checks. If you manage a number of checks, your ATS should bring everything together in one area of the system. Completing all checks and uploading supporting evidence should be convenient and audit ready. A good Applicant Tracking System should leave you feeling totally secure by highlighting any outstanding checks on approach to start date.

Want to know more?

CVMinder ATS helps employers recruit for themselves. It manages advertising, applications, selection, interviews, offers, employment checks and more.  It’s a low cost, award winning Applicant Tracking System and it’s developed in the UK. To recruit like the professionals and reduces your annual recruitment costs, contact us now to find out more.