How Tipico reduced their time to hire and risk of discrimination

Tipico: Putting the Fun Back in Gaming Recruitment

Corrina Galea admits she ‘fell’ into her talent acquisition role at Tipico, after spending the majority of her career in customer service-focused positions. But more than four and a half years later, she’s still with the sports betting company and couldn’t be happier that she opted for a change.

“I love working for Tipico and I love the talent acquisition function, it’s really dynamic and so multicultural. Our employees represent around 30 different nationalities, so it's a great environment to work in.”

The challenges of gaming recruitment

According to Corrina, one of the biggest challenges for recruiters in the gaming industry is the level of competition for great talent. She said, “companies are always upping the stakes when it comes to benefits and salaries offered, everyone wants to be better than everyone else. So it's quite difficult to bring people in and then retain them long-term, because there's always the attraction of the other employers.”

Given the industry is so heavily governed, compliance has traditionally been a barrier to efficiency across the business and has added complexity and time to the hiring process. “We have a big compliance team and they're involved in everything we do. Otherwise, we risk our license. It’s fundamental to our business.”

Which is one of the reasons why Tipico is so keen to use technology to manage its recruitment processes. As Corrina pointed out, “Once a tool is checked and given the seal of approval, we can be 100 percent sure that everything we do is compliant and there's no room for any human errors.”

Life before Xref

In her current role as Talent Acquisition Operations Lead, Corrina oversees the technology solutions used by the team but she’s still an active Xref user and has been since it was introduced.

She recalls the issues they previously faced with reference checking, saying “It was quite a lengthy and cumbersome process so we actually didn't do it for every single hire that we made. We weren't ticking all the boxes for every employee, it was only if we had any doubt that we’d get references, which isn't ideal.”

And when they were looking for a solution to help with the referencing process, it was crucial to the team to find something that integrated with SmartRecruiters. “The fact that Xref integrates with SmartRecruiters was a key selling point for us from the start. It was important that the implementation would be straightforward and that the two platforms would be simple to use together.”

Working with Xref and SmartRecruiters

The seamlessness of the integration is a huge benefit to Corrina and her team but she’s also passionate about the consistency and lack of bias both platforms enable, “Together, Xref and SmartRecruiters are simple, compliant, and fair. That fairness is really important to us.

“We're now referencing every single employee, rather than just whoever we think might have something to hide. When you're taking down notes and talking to someone on the phone, it's very easy to interpret things the wrong way. Using Xref and SmartRecruiters takes away that human bias and everything’s done in the same way for every candidate, there's no risk of discrimination.

“We also have a really good relationship with both teams. Whenever we bring up any issues, they’re always looked into and resolved really quickly, which is great. The ease of use combined with the support and relationships both teams offer has been fantastic and that’s a huge plus for our processes and our team.”