“Xref enables us to run an efficient employment verification service by automating the experience. Xref has global reach just like us and really cares about the end user.” - Liane Hernandez, Group Manager, Global Talent Acquisition and Mobility at BAI Communications
“Xref enables us to run an efficient employment verification service by automating the experience. Xref has global reach just like us and really cares about the end user.”
Avg. reference turnaround time
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Number of candidates referenced annually
Liane Hernandez: I help organisations attract, retain, and engage the very best talent and create opportunities for people to develop their skills and career path. In my current position at BAI, I lead the talent acquisition and deployment functions for the global businesses. My role is to support executives to build impactful and effective talent acquisition and mobility programmes. Diversity and equal opportunity underpin all the work that I do. Currently based in Sydney, my global experience includes time spent in London, New York, and Boston.
Outside of my current role, I continue my ongoing relationship with Telstra, judging their Business Awards and Women's Business Awards, as well as supporting a tech start up in the parental leave space and keeping busy being a mum to a fabulous one-year-old.
BAI Communications designs, builds, and operates communications infrastructure – cellular, Wi-Fi, broadcast, radio, and IP networks – in confined, complex, and challenging environments. BAI is an engineering expert and technology innovator with proven experience in delivering the next wave of connectivity solutions through its long-term partnerships with mobile network operators, broadcasters, transit operators, and governments. We operate in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, United Kingdom, and the United States.
Over the past six months Australia has experienced the perfect storm of devastating bushfires and floods, followed by the outbreak of COVID-19 and the spotlight was on BAI to provide sources of communication and connectivity. Our Australian business chose to postpone recruitment for a brief period to focus on the health and wellbeing of our people and supporting our customers.
Less recruitment activity meant our Talent Acquisition team could focus on self-development and training as well as sourcing new technology, improving the hiring manager and candidate experience, re-engaging with our vendors, process improvement, better reporting, and talent pipelining. I am pleased that our Talent Acquisition team will not operate the same way it did before, rather, we have evolved to a better way of working.
Our operations in New York and London have been most affected from a wellbeing perspective and at the Group level we have focused on supporting them with their hiring needs. The challenges have been around engaging with potential candidates, interviewing, and making those connections. Immigration and border restrictions have impacted our employee mobility programme, limiting our opportunity to move internal talent around our global organisation. We have had to be adaptive and our situation is still constantly changing. The prospect of starting a new role remotely will be different for everyone as each person’s situation is unique. So, we are very focused on our onboarding processes for overseas candidates as well as the way we resource. Encouraging feedback and improving effectiveness has never been more important than it is today.
So, the past few months have proven that it is possible to hire people remotely while continuing to collaborate and support hiring managers. Our new technology and improvements have already had phenomenal results, including great ‘remote team-working’ and fun along the way.
Using and introducing the right technology and automating processes allows us to be more strategic and more efficient in the way we allocate our time. It means that we can raise the achievements and profile of the talent acquisition team by freeing people up to spend more time on critical matters and sourcing exceptional talent.
As an example, as part of a recent global talent review, we saw our strongest results yet, with a direct correlation between people who passed through our hiring assessments and benchmarking requirements with those that have been promoted. We can credit this to the efforts of our Talent Acquisition team and effective hiring processes.
Speed. Candidate, recruiter and hiring manager experience. Convenience for the referee and the candidate, to name just a few.
I like that we can customise our reference templates to account for our organisational nuances and language differences across our international business and we can also tailor questions and build reporting.
The Xref team is a great representation of the business. The people are responsive, friendly, and easy to work with. Having good vendors who get to know our business, share their insights and information, and keep the Talent Acquisition team up to date is very important to me. I rely heavily on them to keep me informed with what is happening in the recruitment industry.
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