63198Modern Professional References: Preparing Organisations for Remote HiringClosedFeasibility StudiesInnovate UKBritain is known all over the world for its work in the Financial Services, Professional Services, Software and Advertising sectors. All of these industries rely on being staffed by highly skilled, innovative and adaptable professionals. Historically these traits are assessed in a series of face to face interactions which is no longer possible in the short term due to Covid-19\. In the medium to long term, many companies are realising that Covid-19 presents an exciting opportunity to rethink their talent strategy. This forced change to remote working has demonstrated that skilled, innovative and adaptable employees do fantastic work without the rigidity of a 9-5, Monday to Friday environment. Consequently companies now have the freedom and flexibility to hire from all over the UK and even the world. It is also unfortunately possible that we as a global society will face another pandemic in the future, meaning that companies learning to adapt now to a remote world will have a competitive advantage over those that don't. It is not just existing teams within companies that need to adapt, it is the hiring practices in order to acquire high quality talent that needs to change too. In person interviews today often mirror snippets of a real life work scenario. For example, white-boarding a problem, or presenting to a group. Although this can be done on video conferencing, the nuance is often missed and technical challenges / distractions are inevitable. In summary, the experience is poorer. Instead of simply taking real life in person interview techniques and transitioning them into a video conference context and making poorer decisions as a consequence, we are proposing disrupting, simplifying and improving the interview process as a whole, by modernising professional references. As a technology company focusing on building a flexible working platform we are uniquely positioned to solve this problem, drawing on over 30,000 professional records for initial research. We ourselves have adapted successfully ourselves to a purely remote environment with no need for additional physical products or interactions in order to fulfil this project.