I work for a Charital Housing Association dealing with recruitment. I am finding it hard to receive reference requests for potential new employees who have been offered employment once the references have been requested. (references are requested via post and email) 

I know that an alternative is to obtain a verbal reference to speed the process but this is not acceptable by our regulators who undertake audits within HR. Does anyone have any solutions that they could share.

Jas,

There are a number of ways of doing this - none is perfectand indeed at one organisation I was at recently, we dropped references as 'non-workable and of zero value'.

Having said that and coming from a similar regulated environment at Royal Mail, we simply made the offers conditional on references, where those did not come back in a given time frame, the new employee was informed that they needed to chase them up (not us) and if they still not appear, then the line manger of the individual was told to dismiss the employee. It worked very well as the new employee tended to sort the issue out once they knew the sanction and that there was a zero tolerance policy.

A I say it does somewhat depend on your environment and in particular the time between offer and start date.

hope that helps

Mark

(www.peaktalent.co.uk)