The Challenge

For John Giseburt, Kelly SETT’s Vice President of Strategic Enablement, delivering unique and differentiated value to clients is a moving target, because as expectations rise, so does his team’s ability to execute on a bold vision.

“I’ve spent decades cultivating a deep understanding of strategic sourcing and recruiting best practices,” said Giseburt, “and believe me when I say that the process by which we place candidates in roles has fundamentally changed. I think it’s pretty broadly known that a resume can be written pretty easily now with generative AI, and that candidates can even rely on AI engines to help them answer live interview questions. These standards that we have relied on for accurate screening just aren’t so accurate any longer.”

Indeed, Kelly SETT found itself facing several unique but related challenges. First, how could it move faster in the placement process given demand fluctuations and a huge pool of talent to vet and accurately assess? Second, what could it capitalize on in order to stand apart from its more analog and risk-averse competitors to strengthen its client value propositions and relationships? And third, how could it quantify, with data-driven precision, that what it had tried was working?

With this in mind, Giseburt decided it was time for the SETT division to start conducting reference checks on candidates as standard operating procedure, to ensure that the team had a way of validating that candidates were truly capable and best-fit for the roles in which they were being placed. The next question was what type of solution the team could leverage to achieve this.

The Result

To put it simply, the results are exemplary.

Kelly SETT expected efficiency improvements from using RefAssured, but the platform’s unique reference reports and built-in warm talent and client lead generation capabilities have introduced a host of benefits.

“We just placed a candidate who opted in as a warm talent lead from RefAssured,” said Giseburt, “with a $40,000 placement fee. We not only know it came from RefAssured but also which exact search it originated from, because RefAssured automatically writes all the lead information back into the talent record in our Bullhorn ATS. I chuckle when people hesitate to invest in a solution like RefAssured because they’re afraid to spend money on innovation. Okay, that’s fine – you wait it out. We’ll take all those placement fees in the meantime!”

And it’s not just talent leads. Client leads have been pouring in for Kelly SETT, thanks to RefAssured.

“I’m staring at a list of 100 client leads we’ve gotten through RefAssured,” Giseburt continued. “These are high-quality client leads, people with decision-making authority that we need and want to be talking to. There are so many leads that I’m dedicating an entire team to just responding to all these hot leads from RefAssured. This is on top of the fact that we’re getting a formula for candidate quality and quicker placements and an easier, more efficient process.”

RefAssured’s informative, digestible, and action-oriented reference reports have also helped Kelly SETT deliver differentiated value to its clients and support customer satisfaction and retention.

“One of our customers said very matter-of-factly to me,” said Giseburt, “no one else is giving me this type of report. Keep this up. Using RefAssured puts your team in a whole different class than everyone else.”

Additionally, RefAssured has been warmly received by the in-demand technical talent that Kelly SETT places, increasing engagement and candidate satisfaction levels.

Giseburt explained the positive impact that RefAssured has had on talent. “We tell our candidates that a third-party company, RefAssured, is going to engage with them to collect references, and that these reference reports will help set them apart from everyone else in the talent pool. We do it very early on, in the submittal stage. Not only does this take a ton of work off our hands, but it gives us the ability to do the things we love to do – using this tremendous, trustworthy insight to create sizzle reels of sorts for our candidates and celebrate what makes them shine.”

Giseburt continued: “Candidates love it, clients love it, and our recruiting managers think that RefAssured is just an absolute game-changer. We brag about this tool in company town halls. It’s that core to our process now. Why wouldn’t everyone use this?”