TempAllyReferencing is one of those steps that everyone agrees matters, and everyone dreads doing manually. Chasing a previous employer for a reply, following up when they've gone quiet, then chasing the candidate for a second referee because the first one's on holiday, it can turn a two day onboarding into a two week one without anyone actually doing anything wrong.
Why referencing is usually the bottleneck
Most of onboarding is within your control, the candidate fills in a form, uploads a document, books a slot. Referencing isn't, because you're relying on a third party who has no particular reason to prioritise your request. A busy HR manager at a candidate's old employer might take a week to reply to an email, longer if it lands at a bad time.
That third-party dependency is exactly why referencing tends to be the step that drags out an otherwise fast onboarding process. The good news is the delay usually isn't the reference itself, it's the gap between requests, follow ups and reminders that a consultant has to remember to send.
What automation actually changes
Automated referencing doesn't remove the need for a human reference, it removes the need for a human to manually chase one. The request goes out automatically the moment a candidate provides referee details, a reminder fires if there's no response after a few days, and the consultant only gets involved if something needs a personal touch, a referee who's unresponsive after multiple attempts, for example.
That shift, from a consultant remembering to follow up, to the system following up automatically, is where most of the time saving comes from. A reference that might have taken ten days with manual chasing often comes back inside three or four when the follow up is consistent and immediate.
It also makes the record more reliable
Manually chased references tend to live wherever they were received, an inbox, a downloaded PDF, sometimes a note taken over the phone. Automated referencing keeps the request, the response, and the date it was received all attached to the candidate's profile, which matters both for your own visibility and if a client or auditor ever asks to see it.
What happens when a reference raises a concern?
Automating the chase doesn't mean automating the judgement call, and this is worth being clear about. If a reference comes back with a flag, an unexplained gap, a lukewarm answer to a question about reliability, that's exactly the point where a consultant should be looking at it personally, not where the system should be making a decision on its own.
The value of automation here is that it gets the reference in front of a human faster and with more context, not that it removes the human from the decision. A reference that arrives with the request, the full response, and the date it was received all attached to the candidate's profile is much easier to weigh properly than one buried in a forwarded email chain from three weeks ago. Automating the collection frees up the time a consultant actually needs to spend on the references that deserve a closer look.
What this means for time to placement
Every day referencing takes is a day a compliant, willing candidate isn't earning and your agency isn't placing them. Agencies that automate this step consistently see candidates ready to work faster, simply because the gaps between "reference requested" and "reference received" shrink from days to closer to hours.
Getting referee details right the first time
A surprising share of referencing delays trace back to a simple problem, wrong contact details for the referee. An outdated email address or a phone number for someone who's since left the company means the first "reminder" a consultant sends is really the first attempt at making contact at all, days after the request supposedly went out.
Capturing referee details as part of candidate onboarding, rather than chasing them separately once a placement's already in motion, closes this gap before it opens. It also means a candidate who's ready to start already has referees on file, so there's no extra delay waiting on them to dig out contact details you could have collected weeks earlier.
TempAlly automates the referencing chase from request through to reminders, with everything logged against the candidate's profile so you can see exactly where each reference stands without having to ask. It's a small change in process that tends to have an outsized effect on how fast candidates actually get to work.
If referencing is slowing your onboarding down, book a demo and we'll show you how it works.
