SYDNEY, Nov. 15, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Global HR tech platform Xref (ASX:XF1) has officially launched Australia's first fully agnostic, API-only marketplace for digital employment trust products to its 1,300 worldwide customers, 1.3 million users, and an addressable market of 15 million workers in Australia and New Zealand.

Xref co-founder & CEO Lee-Martin Seymour

The vendor-agnostic 'Trust Marketplace' aggregates a wide range of the best providers and digital trust products related to employment verification and sourced from around the world, delivered to resellers via integrated APIs, or accessible by all employers via the Xref Enterprise Platform.

It provides access to new and innovative trust products such as adverse social media sweeps and exclusive access to the proprietary qualification data of Australia and New Zealand's (ANZ) 400,000+ yearly graduates through the new Graduate Verification Service (GVS).

The GVS grants access to a proprietary and exclusive centralised repository of tertiary graduate data covering over 20 years of historical records for 47 public universities across ANZ, plus an ever-expanding list of other tertiary providers, such as TAFEs and private providers. 

Without this tech, qualification checks are typically painstaking, piecemeal, and impracticable. It is almost impossible to verify that a candidate is being truthful - the year of course completion and results are rarely obtained with a manual request, and mere confirmation of attendance is not sufficient.

The Marketplace also enables access to traditional trust products such as ID, employment verifications, rights-to-work, and criminal checks through its real-time identity verification, screening, and compliance platform, Rapid ID, with its fully-branded web flow tool for API clients to use for respondent data collection.

Other vendors who already share services via API, and who will become the first partners to be included in the Trust Marketplace offering, include Equifax, HES, Checkr, First Advantage, uCheck, Check Social, and CV Check.

Using the Trust Marketplace, an employer can rapidly, comprehensively, and reliably vet hundreds of candidates at a time in a cost-effective manner in an instant across multiple categories simultaneously.

The platform is also client agnostic, meaning it could also enable a range of application checks by functions outside of employment such as online banking, lending, telecommunications, and any other online function where the consumer needs to be trusted, according to Xref. 

Lee-Martin Seymour, Xref co-founder & CEO, said: "As talent acquisition grows to become increasingly remote on a more permanent basis, the demand for online and automated reference surveys, identity verification, and other pre-employment checks will continue to grow.

"Smart employers know they need to move quickly in this tight employment market if they wish to compete in the global race for talent. In such a race, waiting weeks for reference or other checks almost guarantees losing valuable candidates. But the need for speed doesn't have to mean cutting corners when it comes to comprehensively assessing your candidates and the claims on their applications. There is no value in being first to hire someone who represents themselves fraudulently which, combined with the need for rapid recruitment, is the exact problem the Trust Marketplace solves.

"This growing need also puts Trust Marketplace in a strong position to scale globally due to the increasing demand for more trust partners from a rapidly growing list of international customers.

"As migratory labour continues to increase, employers will need to embrace a far wider pool of talent while still checking and verifying this talent in their country of origin. Staging key global checks and providing fast access via API is essential to the growth of Australia's emerging overseas talent pool."

Xref (www.xref.com, ASX:XF1) is a global HR tech company with a cloud-based platform that offers the HR industry actionable and data-driven insights, from pre-employment recruitment checks through to retention feedback tools, and exit interviews.

Xref has over 1,300 customers including blue chip brands such as Westpac, KPMG, Qantas, Coles, EY, Etsy, TAFE NSW, Rabobank, Air New Zealand, and Uniqlo. It also has over 1.3 million users across 195 countries, making it one of Australia's most global technology companies.