APRA is looking at the big picture – the stability of the banking system. So, while its proposal to phase out hybrids might make sense from that perspective, it’s going to deprive many of an investment option that has delivered healthy income streams.
In the past few months, shareholders have been receiving more attention from fraudsters who have been impersonating individuals via identity theft to steal their shares. Tragically, self-funded retirees are often vulnerable with many still reliant on snail mail.
Hiring platform paves the way to automation
Aussie start-up XREF (ASX:XF1) is an online candidate referencing workflow tool that allows employers to professionally conduct pre-employment reference checks on suitable candidates. Xref transforms reference-checking to add strategic value to the hiring process, while saving time and money for employers and protecting them from breaches of privacy, discrimination and reference fraud.
It’s a tool to prevent fraudsters and imposters from being hired. It also saves time and money because reference-checking is manual and tiring.
Last week, we connected with Xref CEO and co-founder Lee-Martin Seymour, who gave us a good run-through of how the platform works and how its technology will set the standard for reference-checking going forward.
Seymour began his journey 11 years ago, in 2010, reinventing the way people take references. The current way is manual and arduous, and it costs companies an awful lot of time to manually fact-check and reference a candidate. “For these reasons, companies were simply not doing it or not doing it well,” he says. “So, I reinvented the way that people could collect reference feedback. I built the platform to basically address three things – fraud, discrimination and breaches in privacy.”
And the journey wasn’t an easy one. Seymour says “It took us five years to convince the likes of Westpac, PWC and Macquarie Bank that automating such procedures will protect their company. To move forward in 2016, we lifted so that we could grow globally. A platform like Xref is required on a global scale.”
Job applicants brandishing their CVs full of “creativity” is now a common sight. IT advances now aid persons wanting to stand out from the crowd enhance their employment histories. A 2020 survey of over 1,000 US workers undertaken by ResumeLab found that a staggering 93% of respondents knew someone who lied on their CV. And it is not just applicants for lower-level positions who play this game. Back in 2014, Myer (ASX: MYR) hired a general manager for strategic and business development (on a $400,000 salary package) only to find he had a long history of resume fraud.
So how exactly does the platform work?
“We allow the employer to replace that manual reference-checking process by simply making a request on a candidate in 30 seconds,” Seymour says. “The candidate then drives the process and puts in their references and key data and the platform will go and off and collect that feedback from their referees and bring it back to the employer. On the way, we can, via an algorithm, check any fraud during the process.”
Seymour highlights an example of fraud where the referee had given feedback using the same device or Wi-Fi as the candidate; then the platform will flag a “potential irregularity.”
The platform also has a sentiment algorithm that reads the feedback and determines overall whether it is positive or negative. “For example, say I was hiring someone and I wanted to hire them, the sentiment would be positive. We can check the sentiment and benchmark the candidate against the rest of the candidates.”
The platform also has RapidID, to validate the identification of the person. This is a big area of growth for the company.
“There’s three things you need to know before hiring someone – Where has that person been? What have they done in a previous role? And are they who they say they are?” Seymour says. “We can do all of this within 24 hours and be able to bring back insights so an employer can make an informed decision on hiring.
“In the employment market, people put too much weight on the resume; whereas what they should be looking for is everything that isn’t on it,” Seymour says. The next leg of the platform is to validate identification using RapidID. So, if an employer requires a police check or working-with-children check, the platform is able to do this as well. So it’s just another added feature of the offering.
“There’s two types of candidates – there’s the job seeker and the job getter,” Seymour concludes. “I’m afraid to say, there are so many people that can interview very well. They sell themselves and can land any job. But they’re horrible at doing the job. You have to contact their past managers to see if they are any good, because history repeats. ”
Shares are up strongly this week on the back of the company’s profit result with 140% sales growth.
