Xref Safeguards Life Without Barriers to Hire the Right People

Life Without Barriers is one of Australia’s largest not-for-profit organisations, delivering services in the areas of disability and mental health support, out-of-home care and support or refugee and asylum seekers.

Given the sensitive nature of the people they work with, there is an essential responsibility for Life Without Barriers to ensure they employ the right people.

That’s precisely why Keryn Paviour-Smith, the NationalTalent and Attraction Manager at Life Without Barriers, turned to Xref.

A key principle of Life Without Barriers’ success is that relationships come first.  

Maintaining strong relationships with all stakeholders encompasses a need for the not-for-profit organisation to hire the right people so they can continue to support more than 15,000 people each year to live their life, their way.

“When they’re supporting clients, either children living in foster care, clients with disabilities or refugee and asylum seekers, then we absolutely need to make sure that those people are going to behave in the appropriate way with those clients,” Paviour-Smith said.

This vital need for due diligence led Paviour-Smith to look for ways to improve several areas of Life Without Barriers’ hiring process.

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Areas of concern:

• ‍Quality: Life Without Barriers were sourcing their references over the phone and the person conducting the reference check may not even take notes from the call. This lack of insight into the individual impacted the quality of the candidate they potentially hired.‍
• Storage: With no notes recorded, there were no references stored efficiently for Human Resources Managers to refer back to.‍
• Time: Prior to adopting Xref, the turnaround time for references was 1-2. Given the urgency of the people they service, this was unacceptable.‍
• CompanyPolicies: Life Without Barriers mandates that the organisation conducts at least two reference checks for external employees. With the admin-heavy nature of their previous structure, reference-checking wasn’t allowing Life WithoutBarriers to be at their best.

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Benefits provided by Xref:

Since adopting Xref, Life Without Barriers has enjoyed a myriad of benefits such as:

• ‍Improved governance: Without a doubt, the biggest benefit for Life Without Barriers is the peace of mind that they are definitely hiring the right people.‍
• The right people for the right roles: With questionnaire customisation capabilities, Life Without Barriers can tailor their questions for their different roles. It goes without saying that clients with disabilities and asylum seekers have vastly different needs.‍
• Improved storage capabilities: Xref’s industry-leading technology allows LifeWithout Barriers to possess digitally stored information they can access with ease at any time.‍
• Reduction in time: Life Without Barriers has dramatically cut their reference turn around time from up to two weeks, to an average of just 24 hours.‍
• Easy adoption: “The switch-on was extremely easy,” Paviour-Smith said. “We were up and running within a very short space of time.”

Typically, it takes 24 - 30 hours for a candidate report to come back and that is just a phenomenal turnaround time compared to what was happening previously where it might take 1-2 weeks for us to get the reference checks back.

With more than 4,000 staff, Paviour-Smith could not be happier with the enhanced functionality of her organisation, thanks to Xref.

“Xref are great people to work with. We haven’t had to contact them all that often to be honest because the technology has been so smooth and so seamless.

“Xref gives us a really good understanding of whether we think the candidate is a right fit for Life Without Barriers.

“The fact that we’ve got typed-up references stored in the cloud for us to access at any time makes it just so much better than our previous process.”

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