Xref NZ: Customer Shares Reference Check Improvement Story

Fletcher Building has enhanced their recruitment process through the use of Xref and automated reference checking

Having been founded in 1909, Fletcher Building has a rich heritage in New Zealand’s building sector. While the world, our customers and our roles have changed, we have maintained a focus on one core vision: we always build better, together.

Ensuring that we maintain a commitment to that vision requires an unrelenting dedication to finding the right people to join the team – our recruitment team is continuously seeking great talent that’s the right fit for our “team-player” culture.

Fletcher Building also operates in more than 40 countries, manufacturing and distributing world-leading building and construction products, so while we’re headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand, our recruitment team is also required to identify talent on a global scale.  

The flexibility and ease of the Xref process allows the recruitment team to confidently and efficiently identify the best candidates, while also having the time to dedicate to other value-adding aspects of their role.

Guaranteeing efficiency

Due to the international nature of the recruitment process at Fletcher Building, prior to Xref our recruitment team was often found working late or arriving at the office early in order to catch overseas referees during their business hours.

Our team will often be liaising with referees in Canada, the USA, South Africa and the United Kingdom at any one time. We recently hired 32 people in one campaign, and all the referees were in the UK - the time difference alone made it hard to organise a time when both the recruiter and referee were available.

The inconvenience of liaising with a referee based in another country, time zone and even hemisphere meant the time taken to turnaround the reference checking process for just one candidate could be as long two to three weeks.

The traditional reference collection process was highly inefficient and time consuming for our team and often frustrating for the referee when calls were made at inappropriate times.

By far the greatest benefit we’ve witnessed through the introduction of Xref is the time saved in conducting the reference checking process.

Using Xref circumvents the inevitable ‘‘back and forth” with a referee to secure a time to complete the reference check and what could have taken weeks in the past, can now be done and reported within 36 hours.

Enabling job satisfaction

The efficiency of the new recruitment process has opened a significant window of opportunity for the recruitment team, allowing them to utilise the time saved to focus on more value-adding aspects of the role.

The speed and ease of Xref enables the recruitment team to refocus on the elements of their role that they are truly passionate about, such as proactively sourcing talent, understanding their place in the business and their value to it, and strengthening the selection process in line with the organisational goals.

Rather than spending a significant proportion of their working day contacting, chasing and scheduling calls with referees, our recruitment team is finding greater variety and complexity in their work, thus significantly improving job satisfaction across the team.

Industry Alignment

Given the manner of businesses that fall under the Fletcher Building umbrella, identifying the most appropriate time to call a referee has always been difficult. However, the nature of all the core industries we operate across – construction, manufacturing and retail – means that one rule applies in most cases, “business hours” are not the best time to call a referee, given they will likely be on a construction site, in a manufacturing plant, or on a shop floor.

Prior to the introduction of Xref, this again resulted in some out of hours work for our recruitment team, staying behind in an attempt to catch referees once they were in a safe and convenient place to take a call.

The ability for a referee to provide reference details in their own time is another major benefit offered by the Xref platform.

Fletcher Building continually recruits for a broad range of roles - everything from C-Suite positions through to truck drivers and distribution centre staff.

The speed at which Xref can develop and issue a standardised reference template, ensuring responses are consistent and can be benchmarked once data is collected, means we are operating more efficiently now and have scope to continually improve our recruitment processes in the future.  

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