1.5 Hours Per Candidate Playing Phone Tag With Referees Who Never Pick Up: The True Cost of Manual Reference Checks

I want you to do some maths with me. Not complicated maths — just the kind that makes you quietly furious when you see the total.

Pick a recruiter at your agency. Any one of them. Ask them how long it takes to complete reference checks for a single candidate. Not the phone call itself — the entire process. The initial outreach to two or three referees. The voicemails that go unanswered. The follow-up emails. The second round of follow-up emails. The “just circling back” messages. The phone tag. The finally-connected conversation where the referee gives you five minutes between meetings. The note transcription. The formatted report for the client.

I’ve timed this at over a dozen agencies. The answer is consistently 1 to 1.5 hours per candidate, spread across 3-5 days of elapsed time. And that number assumes everything goes smoothly — which, as any recruiter will tell you, it almost never does.

The Reference Check Time Audit

Let me break down what I observed at a 12-desk agency in Brisbane that was placing roughly 25 candidates per month. The recruitment manager asked me to help them understand where their time was going, so I had three senior recruiters log every reference-related activity for two weeks.

Here’s what one candidate’s reference check looked like — a marketing manager being placed at a mid-market SaaS company. The client required two professional references from direct supervisors within the last five years.

Referee #1: Former manager at a telco company.

• Day 1: Recruiter calls the number provided. Goes to voicemail. Leaves a message explaining who she is and why she’s calling. Sends a follow-up email with the candidate’s name and a request to call back. Elapsed time: 8 minutes.
• Day 1 (afternoon): No response. Sends another email, slightly more urgent. 3 minutes.
• Day 2: Calls again at 9 AM, then at 2 PM. Two voicemails. 6 minutes.
• Day 2 (end of day): Emails the candidate to ask if she has an alternative number or a better time to reach this referee. Candidate responds that he’s “usually available in the mornings.” 4 minutes.
• Day 3: Calls at 8:30 AM. Referee picks up. He’s in the car and asks to call back in an hour. Recruiter sets a reminder. 2 minutes.
• Day 3: Calls back at 9:45. Referee is now in a meeting. Voicemail again. 2 minutes.
• Day 3 (afternoon): Referee finally calls back. The actual reference conversation takes 12 minutes. Recruiter writes up notes immediately after while the detail is fresh. 18 minutes total for conversation plus notes.

That’s one referee: 43 minutes of recruiter time spread across three days.

Referee #2: Current colleague (not supervisor — the candidate didn’t want their current employer contacted, so the client agreed to a senior peer reference).

• Day 1: Email sent. Referee responds same day — but asks for the questions in writing because she “doesn’t have time for a call this week.” 5 minutes.
• Day 1: Recruiter types out the reference questions and sends them. 12 minutes.
• Day 3: No response. Follow-up email. 3 minutes.
• Day 5: Referee sends back responses. Three of the five answers are one-line responses that don’t give the client anything useful. Recruiter calls to probe further. Gets voicemail. 4 minutes.
• Day 6: Connects by phone. Gets the additional detail needed. Writes up notes. 15 minutes.

Second referee: 39 minutes across six days.

Then the recruiter formats both references into the agency’s standard report template, cross-checks dates and titles against the candidate’s CV, and emails the completed report to the client contact. That’s another 20 minutes.

Total time for one candidate: 1 hour 42 minutes. Total elapsed time: 6 business days.

Scale That Across Your Agency

Now multiply that by 25 placements per month. Two references per candidate. That’s 50 reference check conversations — plus all the failed outreach attempts, follow-ups, and report writing surrounding them.

At 1.5 hours per candidate (and my Brisbane example was actually on the high side of normal), you’re looking at 37.5 hours of recruiter time per month dedicated to reference checking. That’s nearly a full week of one recruiter’s time. Every month.

But the dollar cost is only half the problem. The bigger issue is what happens during those 4-8 days while your recruiter is playing phone tag with referees.

Your candidate is waiting. Your client is waiting. And in a competitive market, waiting is losing.

I worked with an agency in Sydney that tracked their fall-offs — candidates who accepted another offer or withdrew during the hiring process. Over a 12-month period, 14% of their fall-offs occurred specifically during the reference checking stage. Not because the references were bad. Because the process took too long and the candidate assumed the silence meant the client was losing interest.

Fourteen percent of their fall-offs. At an average placement fee of $18,000, and roughly 8 fall-offs in that period attributable to reference delays, that’s $144,000 in lost revenue. Not because of bad candidates or tough clients. Because referees didn’t return phone calls fast enough.

Why Referees Don’t Respond (And What To Do About It)

Before I get to the automation, it’s worth understanding why this process is so painful — because the solution needs to address the root causes, not just speed up the symptoms.

Referees don’t respond quickly for three predictable reasons:

They don’t know who you are. A referee gets a voicemail from someone at an agency they’ve never heard of, asking them to call back about a former employee. Their instinct is to ignore it — it sounds like a sales call or a scam. The candidate told them it was coming, but they forgot, or the name of the agency didn’t stick.

The timing is wrong. You’re calling during business hours because that’s when you work. They’re in meetings during business hours because that’s when they work. The intersection of “you’re available to talk” and “they’re available to talk” is a tiny window that neither of you can easily identify without multiple failed attempts.

The effort feels high. A phone call is an open-ended time commitment. The referee doesn’t know if this will take 5 minutes or 30. They’re not opposed to giving a reference — they’re just putting it off because they can’t predict how long it will take or when to slot it in.

Automated reference checking addresses all three friction points. The outreach email comes with the candidate’s name, photo, and context front and centre. The referee chooses when to respond — midnight on their couch is fine. And the structured questionnaire gives them a clear sense of scope: six questions, estimated 8 minutes. That’s dramatically easier to say yes to than an unpredictable phone call.

Manual vs. Automated: Where the Time Goes

The comparison isn’t about replacing the reference conversation. It’s about eliminating the 80% of the process that isn’t the conversation.

What the Automation Actually Does

The system connects Bullhorn, Gmail, Google Sheets, and Google Calendar into a single workflow that handles the operational burden of reference checking while keeping the recruiter in control of quality.

Trigger: Candidate reaches reference stage. When a candidate’s status in Bullhorn changes to “Reference Check” or “Offer — Pending References,” the automation pulls the candidate record, extracts referee contact details, and initiates the outreach sequence. If referee details are incomplete, the system emails the candidate requesting the missing information before proceeding.

Outreach: Personalised, structured, low-friction. Each referee receives an email that includes the candidate’s name, the role they’re being considered for (without revealing the client name if the agency prefers confidentiality), and a link to a structured questionnaire. The questionnaire covers the standard reference dimensions — relationship to candidate, dates of employment, key strengths, areas for development, rehire eligibility — but is customisable per role or client. The referee can complete it on their phone in 8-10 minutes.

Follow-up: Persistent but professional. If a referee hasn’t responded after 24 hours, a follow-up email fires. At 48 hours, another. At 72 hours, the recruiter receives an alert with options: escalate to a phone call (the system offers the referee calendar slots to book a call), ask the candidate to nudge the referee, or flag the reference as unresponsive and request an alternative.

Collection: Structured and standardised. Responses flow into Google Sheets in a structured format — one row per referee, with columns for each question, a completion timestamp, and an overall sentiment score based on keyword analysis. The recruiter can see at a glance which references are complete, which are pending, and whether any responses contain potential red flags (e.g., “would not rehire,” dates that don’t match the CV, vague answers on key competencies).

Reporting: One click, not twenty minutes. When all references are collected, the system compiles them into the agency’s standard report format and attaches it to the candidate record in Bullhorn. The recruiter reviews the report, adds any personal commentary from phone conversations, and sends it to the client. What used to take 20 minutes of copy-pasting and formatting now takes 2 minutes of review.

Compliance: Automatic and complete. Every outreach email, follow-up, response, and report is logged with timestamps in Google Sheets. For agencies in regulated industries or those working with government clients, this audit trail is not optional — and building it manually is one of the most tedious parts of the process. The automation captures it as a byproduct of doing the work.

The ROI Calculation

Let me close the loop on the maths I promised at the start.

Take an agency with 10 recruiters, placing an average of 25 candidates per month, with two references required per candidate.

Current state: Each recruiter handles roughly 5 reference checks per month (some recruiters do more, some less, depending on their desk’s placement volume). At 1.5 hours per candidate, that’s 7.5 hours per recruiter per month on reference checking. Across 10 recruiters, that’s 75 hours per month — nearly two full-time weeks of labour.

With automation: The outreach, follow-up, collection, and reporting are handled by the system. The recruiter’s involvement drops to reviewing completed reports and conducting phone references where written responses aren’t sufficient — roughly 20 minutes per candidate. That’s 1.7 hours per recruiter per month. Across 10 recruiters: 17 hours. You’ve recovered 58 hours per month.

What does 58 recovered hours look like?

At $100/hour loaded cost for a recruiter, that’s $5,800 per month in direct time savings — $69,600 per year. But the real return isn’t in the cost saving. It’s in the time-to-fill reduction.

When reference checks take 4-8 days, your entire offer pipeline is bottlenecked. Candidates are waiting. Clients are waiting. Competing agencies are not waiting — they’re placing candidates while your referees are ignoring your voicemails.

The Brisbane agency I mentioned earlier cut their average reference turnaround from 6.2 business days to 1.8 business days after implementing structured automation. Their fall-off rate during the reference stage dropped from 14% to under 4%. On their volume, that translated to roughly 3 additional placements per quarter that would have otherwise been lost to delays.

Three placements at $18,000 average fee: $54,000 per quarter. $216,000 per year. Plus the $69,600 in recovered recruiter time. That’s $285,600 in annual value from automating what most agencies consider an annoying but unavoidable administrative task.

And here’s the part that surprises people: the client feedback improved too. Hiring managers started commenting that the reference reports were more thorough and easier to read than what they’d been getting. Structured digital responses with consistent formatting and competency ratings are genuinely more useful than a recruiter’s hastily typed phone notes. The automation didn’t just make the process faster — it made the output better.

Reference checking isn’t going away. Clients want it. Compliance requires it. Candidates expect it as part of a professional process. But the way most agencies do it — voicemails, phone tag, manual follow-ups, copy-pasted reports — is a relic from an era when there was no alternative. There is an alternative now. Your recruiters have better things to do with those 75 hours a month, and your candidates can’t afford to wait a week while you chase down referees who are screening their calls.