Xref CEO on why phone-based reference checks are 15 years behind

[00:00] Lee Seymour: If you're still doing phone-based referencing, then you're probably 15 years out of time. It's arduous and it's offering you no value.

[00:11] Kylie Spear: Hello and welcome to HRDTV. I'm Kylie Spear, and joining me today is Lee Martin Seymour, Founder and CEO at XREF. XREF has been named a winner of HRD's Readers' Choice for 2026. Welcome, Lee, and thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:32] Lee Seymour: Thanks, Kylie. Lovely to be here with you.

[00:36] Kylie Spear: Firstly, Lee, congratulations on being named a Readers' Choice Awards 2026 winner. What does this recognition from the HR community mean to you and your team at XREF?

[00:50] Lee Seymour: I always prefer awards in a readers' choice category, because people have chosen us out of a list without being paid off first, right? So it's good for us, because we love putting the microphone in the hands of our clients. If they vote with their feet, that's great for us. And it's a good sign that everything we're doing is paying off.

[01:28] Kylie Spear: XREF helps organisations hire with confidence, build culture with clarity, and turn attrition into retention. How has this vision shaped the way your business supports HR leaders today?

[01:42] Lee Seymour: It's a bit of a mouthful, isn't it? What we're actually talking about is the hire-to-retire journey, covering every moment between a candidate, an employee and an ex-employee. We call it hire to retire, but what we're really doing is having a robust conversation with our clients about turnover.

For us, turnover isn't attrition. In the market, a business might say it went from 100 staff to 100 staff and had no attrition, but the actual turnover figure is 40%. They're just not the same people at the start and the end of the year. So we really want to double down on that turnover conversation.

We can reduce turnover in organisations by focusing on three things. The first is hiring better through better references and additional checks. The second is driving engagement through engagement surveys once people are employees. The third is rehiring through effective exit surveys, which bring people back to the organisation after they've departed, been gone a while and learned some new skills. So we build a partnership with a client from the very beginning of their talent journey all the way to the end, until they choose to rehire that individual.

[03:12] Kylie Spear: Lee, XREF brings together reference checks, background checks, engagement surveys and talent insights on a single platform. What customer needs have most influenced the evolution of your solutions?

[03:28] Lee Seymour: It's a great question. As everyone knows, we started in automated reference checks. In fact, we were the first to bring automated reference checks to the market, 16 years ago. At the time, people thought I had my head on backwards, because I was automating something people were just doing out of habit.

What we've recognised since is that most HR systems are built around either a candidate, an employee or an ex-employee, and those systems don't recognise that individual as one person. With the XREF platform, we focused on making sure the person who is a candidate is recognised as one individual all the way through their employment and out the other side.

So on our platform there is one record. All along their hire-to-retire journey, you have their references, their checks, their pulse surveys, their exit surveys and their rehire data. An organisation has one record on an individual as a talent, and that record is never forgotten. Even as HR or recruitment teams move on and new teams come in, that person is never forgotten by the organisation. We're building corporate memory, so people can come back and organisations can target people to be rehired.

[05:17] Kylie Spear: As organisations increasingly rely on data-driven workforce decisions, what challenges have you seen HR teams face, and how is XREF helping them address these challenges more effectively?

[05:33] Lee Seymour: Reference checks were central in the early days, and they continue to be a keystone of our business. If you think about reference checks for a moment, there's an element of reference fraud that goes on.

There's also a bit of a crisis in the employment sector right now. Job advertisements are being flooded with applications, and those applications are AI-built résumés. There are a couple of hundred applications for every role. Résumés now aren't one or two pages; they're six pages. They're built to echo the required job spec, so everyone is being added to shortlists by the AI technology built into ATSs. What we're not doing is assessing whether those people can actually do the job we're hiring them for.

Historically, the only way we've been able to assess whether someone can do the job is to check whether they've done it in the past, and whether anyone in their community can stand testament to what they've done in previous roles. That's the job of referencing. The challenge for recruitment teams is the time it takes to do those checks and the quality of the data they get back.

If you're still doing phone-based referencing, then you're probably 15 years out of time. It's arduous and it's offering you no value. If we reinvent that, start pulling data using benchmarks, increase speed to hire, lower the cost of hire, and give you much more assurance about the person entering your building on day one, that's going to save you a lot of time and a lot of cost.

[07:38] Kylie Spear: And finally, Lee, looking ahead, how do you plan to build on this Readers' Choice recognition and continue delivering meaningful impact for employers and HR professionals across Australia and New Zealand?

[07:52] Lee Seymour: It's obviously great to have HRD shine a light on us, but I would urge anybody adopting technology within their HR team today to be very critical about what they're selecting. Point solutions aren't working for people. Full platforms that give the organisation the full journey are, but the development roadmap is key, especially in the area of AI.

We're not resting on our laurels. This year we launched Xref.me, which puts the power into the candidate's and the employee's hands. Put simply, the employer has always been the one to request data on candidates and employees. So why can't a candidate become job-ready and get their references ready ahead of time? Why can't an employee finish a project in an organisation and request their own 360 surveys? All of this data belongs to the employee and the candidate, and they should be able to trigger it themselves.

So we've launched Xref.me as a free platform for the talent community. It covers the things people have done well in their careers and the people who can stand testament to them. That means not just past employers, but also lecturers, people they've volunteered with and character references. When they go for their next job or sit down for a career review, they have much more information at their fingertips to prove their provenance and their value to the organisation. That's really important to us. If I were following XREF's journey right now, I'd certainly be looking at what we're doing with Xref.me.

[09:59] Kylie Spear: Well said. Thank you so much for your time today, Lee, and congratulations to you and the entire XREF team once again.

[10:09] Lee Seymour: Thank you, Kylie. Great to be here. Ultimately, we're not just about technology. We're not a vendor; we're a partner to our clients. The people who work at XREF and the service we provide our clients are invaluable. That's why, when people were asked who they would vote for, they selected XREF, and we're very thankful for that.

[10:30] Kylie Spear: And thank you, of course, to our viewers for watching the latest episode of HRDTV. We look forward to seeing you again soon.