Moving Pre-Employment Checks from Compliance to Fast-Tracked Competence

Pre-employment checks with professional referees are a time-honoured, fundamental element of the recruitment process, commonly used to verify the skills, experience, and education of a candidate. However, they are often a flawed concept. By the time you’re ready to offer a preferred candidate a role, you’ve already made up your mind about them. The likelihood that you will obtain contradicting views from their references is low, as candidates are generally savvy enough to choose referees that will provide them with a positive review. Some companies are also opting out of providing references for fear of reputational damage.

As a result, the role of the pre-employment reference check becomes a basic compliance activity to validate qualifications or training that is essential for the role; and a missed opportunity to add real benefit to the process.

Extracting Value

To really get value out of these pre-employment checks, it’s useful to turn it into the continuation of the employee experience journey. Use the process as an opportunity to be better informed about the cultural fit and how to get the best from the candidate.

Set up correctly, the process can support the candidate to hit the ground running by building meaningful relationships, having an immediate understanding with their leader about their learning style and improving speed to competency.

Designing an Insightful Process

It’s estimated that well thought-out onboarding can improve talent retention in the first 12 months by anywhere from 60 – 80%. In aid of this, you should design the process to obtain quality insights about the candidate.

Pre-employment check questions that support this include:

• How have you, as a leader, been able to get the best from the applicant? What processes or interventions have you used to support this?

• When thinking about strategic initiatives, how much detail does the applicant need to get started?

• What have you been focusing on from a skills/capability perspective as part of their development plan?

Recently, I used this approach with a crucial mid-level leadership hire. Through the referencing process, the hiring manager and I identified that the individual enjoys building relationships early in their new roles to gain business context quickly.

Connecting the dots

It’s valuable to then correlate this insight with the information provided by the candidate to develop a plan for the hiring manager of the kind of support the candidate would benefit from when starting in the role.

Appreciating things like the check-in rhythms that have worked well in the past for the candidate, alongside approaches to stretch their strategic thinking will be crucial in supporting a considered and engaging initial onboarding period for the applicant.

In the case of the new hire, we ensured that the first two weeks of their onboarding was less around building technical knowledge and predominately around meeting key stakeholders at all levels to help build connection with the business while also allowing them to critically assess the feedback they were receiving.

It has enabled them to then make immediate impact on process improvements, which have led to significant productivity gains.

Applying the Approach Appropriately

With the process being more strategic and time intensive than a standard verification, it’s more suitable to take this approach for high impact roles that support the business strategy and absolutely all level of leadership. It’s unlikely to be valuable in high churn environments such as retail team member roles that require a simpler and general skillset.

Used appropriately, it can take the recruitment process from a front-end transaction to a continuing experience that deeply influences business success.