A professional reference is a standard employment reference from a previous manager or employer. It covers job title, employment dates, performance, and fit for the role. The questions can be customised, and professional references are used across most industries as part of general pre-employment screening.

A regulatory reference is a mandatory, format-specific reference required by a regulator for candidates going into certain controlled roles. For FCA-regulated firms, that means obtaining references covering the previous four years that address specific conduct and fitness questions under SYSC 22. Ofsted has its own structured reference requirements for education and childcare. Safe recruitment in CQC settings is primarily addressed through other checks. Zinc supports FCA and Ofsted formats and tracks responses against their deadlines automatically.

Once a candidate submits their referee details, Zinc sends each referee a secure digital questionnaire and handles all follow-up from there. We collect candidate consent with an in-app signature, and then Zinc chases non-responding referees up to five times over a 14-day period and stops as soon as someone responds. If referees don’t respond, we’ll also notify candidates up to three times. Your team doesn't need to monitor progress or send a single manual reminder.

Zinc also scans completed references for mismatched dates, job titles, or unclear information and flags anything worth a closer look. For FCA regulatory references, the platform tracks responses against the mandatory four-week deadline and escalates alerts if a response looks like it might arrive late. The whole process runs in the background, so your team only needs to get involved when it’s time to make an actual hiring decision.

95% of references collected through Zinc come back within three days. The typical turnaround for professional references is 17 to 52 hours, depending on how quickly referees respond. FCA regulatory references follow the same automated process and are tracked against the mandatory four-week deadline.

Turnaround is mostly down to referee responsiveness, which Zinc's automated chasing improves significantly versus doing it manually. View Zinc’s live turnaround times for references here.

For UK-based roles, HMRC-verified instant employment verification runs alongside references and comes back in seconds, giving your team verified employment data almost immediately and independently of any referee.

Yes. For FCA-regulated roles, Zinc collects the mandatory four-year reference covering conduct, performance, and regulatory history in line with SYSC 22.

For Ofsted-registered settings, Zinc supports the structured safe recruitment reference requirements for childcare and education providers. In both cases, Zinc tracks responses against the applicable deadline and alerts your team before the window closes.

Completed regulatory references sit in your Zinc dashboard alongside all other candidate screening data, so everything's in one place. It's worth knowing that regulatory reference question sets are structured and set by the regulatory requirement and can't be freely customised the way professional references can.

Zinc sends automatic follow-up emails to non-responding referees, up to five chasers each, and stops the moment a response comes in. You can see the status of all outstanding references in real time from your dashboard. No chasing needed from your side.

If a referee still hasn't responded after all the automated chasers, Zinc flags it as outstanding and lets your team know. You can then decide whether to ask the candidate for alternative referee details or move forward with what you have via Zinc’s “Accept one less” feature. For FCA regulatory references with a mandatory four-week window, Zinc escalates the alert as the deadline gets close so you have time to act.

Yes. Zinc's Unified Referencing combines professional or regulatory references with direct HMRC employment verification in a single workflow. The candidate logs into their Government Gateway account and gives Zinc one-time permission to pull their employment history. You get independently verified employer names and employment dates, straight from HMRC payroll records, alongside the qualitative feedback from referees.

HMRC verification comes back in seconds and is completely separate from what the candidate or their referees tell you. That makes it particularly good at surfacing overlapping employment, undisclosed gaps, or discrepancies between a candidate's stated history and their actual HMRC record. Because HMRC verification doesn’t include job titles, layering them with professional and regulatory references gives you the whole picture of employment history.