In the case of major downsizing, layoffs, mergers and consolidations, your human resources department can quickly become overburdened and burned out handling employee reference requests. Chances are the limited telephone lines will be tied up and many reference requests will go unanswered. Your HR department will be able to do little else. Worse, business critical functions like new hiring, scheduling interviews and providing HR services to your current employees will be negatively affected.

Human Resources most critical function is hiring and maintaining services for your current employees. Providing job references for former employees, which is often limited to basic information due to legal concerns, is a function that can easily be outsourced without affecting any critical business needs.

Make Blue Planet part of your outplacement services. Make us part of the separation package. We will work closely with you to provide the best reference services possible for outgoing employees and do it at very attractive rates.

Once the employees have been separated and your human resources department becomes overwhelmed, it is then difficult and expensive to do much about it. We can help you then too, but it is much easier and cheaper to plan for the separations in advance. This also gives you the opportunity to notify outgoing employees that reference services will be outsourced to Blue Planet Offices, a company that specializes in that exact service, the first and currently only company to offer this specialized support. Your past and present employees will be happier and your own human resources department will be extremely grateful.

Your human resource records will be stored securely and limited to the information you decide to provide. A contract spells out the details and you can rest assured services will be provided with live operators working in our call centers in Southern Florida and other U.S. locations as business requires. Our operators speak excellent English. Your separated employees potential new employers will not be talking to someone in Bangalore, India.

Your company is assigned a dedicated toll free number, or we can provide a local number in the city in which you are located or nearby. In either case the call is free for a local employer inquiring about your former employee. If you expect a significant number of your separated workers to move from the area, then the toll free number is the way to go. The incoming number is received by our telephone system and the application we build for your company brings up relevant information immediately.

Our services are provided on a monthly basis. The cost is based on the number of employees to be covered during the month. We will quote you an exact rate, but the range is from $12.00 to $19.00 per employee. This covers up to 20 reference calls per employee during the month, or one per business day. You can pay for more if desired, or pay for additional calls over the total of 20 x number of employees. One month is the minimum term. Figure your own employee costs, overhead costs, telephone call costs, to say nothing of the detrimental impact handling all those reference calls on your HR department and you will quickly see that your company would be spending much more than what we charge.

If you are going to pay for our reference service for more than one month, additional months will be quoted at lower rates as the number of calls will usually diminish in time.

You will receive daily reports by email of the number of calls. Towards the end of the prepaid period you will be able to make an informed decision on whether you want to handle the calls at that point or extend the prepaid period.

If the period of time the employer has paid for has ended, there are two options. The first option we recommend is that you tell the separated employees that HR references will be outsourced for a specific period of time due to the large volume, and after that time the employee can then use your own HR telephone number. This is the most practical, as the employees will change jobs over the following years and potential employers will want to check their references. It makes sense to handle these long term references in-house.

If for some reason you did not want to handle references in-house on a long term basis, and in the case of questions about the survival of the company, we can provide employment references as we would for defunct companies. We maintain the records at no additional charge. Employees that are searching for a job and want to use our reference service then sign up with us and pay our standard rate.

Most employers will pick up the telephone and call human resources to verify the reference. Reference information requested by mail or fax will continue to be handled by your in-house HR department, so they will not be totally out of the loop. Blue Planet can handle those sorts of requests as well if desired.

We can also provide a notification service to your former employees which they can request and pay for which lets them know when their reference is checked and by who. This information is sent to them by email.

We prefer the HR records in a comma delimited file. Every database program can output a CDF (or CSV) and every database program can import it. We can then easily import the data into our application. The rates above are based upon information provided in this way. If the records are in paper form and need to be input, this can be done and is quoted separately.

For more information, please call our Customer Service number at 305-849-5020 or our Toll Free number at 1-800-518-1206. Email us at sales@employee-references.com.

Thank you for your interest.