Reference checking solutions are increasingly hot in recruitment. One new player within this space is Sweden-built Refapp. We caught up with Niklas Ekberg, account manager at Refapp.
The need for reference checks
Finding the right talent has never been harder. And there’s always a chance that the person you deem the perfect candidate, ends up being a bad hire. Most bad hires stem from a lack of time. Future employees, especially in the current climate, are usually pushed through quickly to ensure the company does not lose the chance of acquiring them. That’s the problem Scandinavian reference checking checking solution Refapp aims to solve.
“Refapp is an in-house reference checking solution”, Ekberg told Recruitment Tech. “The biggest problem that we solve for recruiters is lowering the time-to-hire factor. Refapp saves a lot of time in the reference checking process, but it also gets more out of it. You obviously spend a lot less time on the process, and less time obviously equals less money spent on reference checking.”
Standalone and integrated
Refapp was primarily built as a standalone tool, but the tool has since been developed so it can be smoothly integrated with any applicant tracking system (ATS). Their customers currently include Manpower, WWF, Volvo Group and KPMG — while Refapp is active in 20 different countries and reportedly complete more than 400,000 reference checks each year.
“Some find the system easy enough to use standalone and some use it with an integration.”
“Our customers, I would say it’s 50-50 between those that use it as a standalone tool, and those who have integrated it”, Ekberg said. “Some find the system easy enough to use standalone and some use it with an integration. It’s just kind of up to what what they feel is best for them. We have a lot of customers, but I think what unifies them is that they either spend a lot of time reference checking today or that they want to get more out of reference checking.”
Global ambitions
As far as a roadmap for the next 12 months, Refappp is expected to double-down on its home markets in Scandinavia, where it is currently thriving. “That’s where we’ve really gotten a great hold of the market”, Ekberg said. “So it’s only natural that we try to take as many market shares as we possibly can.”
“We’re going to try to take Refapp global.”
But Ekberg is ambitious about Refapp’s further ventures. “We are getting out in the European and North American markets, as well as the APAC region”, he said. “We have a few customers and in South Africa as well. We’re just going to try to to build on that, basically. We’re going to try to take Refapp global.”
