From 900 to 3,000 employees: How LIC screens thousands of seasonal hires without slowing down

The Customer

Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC) is a dairy farmer-owned cooperative and one of New Zealand's most significant agri-tech companies. With a permanent workforce of around 900 people, the business transforms almost overnight during artificial breeding season, growing to roughly 3,000 employees as approximately 2,000 seasonal hires join within a matter of months.

The Challenge

LIC runs a self-service hiring model, meaning hiring managers own their recruitment end to end. From reviewing CVs and booking interviews through to decisions on psychometric testing and reference checks. This means the tools behind it need to be reliable, intuitive, and easy for managers across the organisation to use independently, at volume, under time pressure.

Those seasonal roles span a wide range: field technicians servicing farms across New Zealand, laboratory staff running genetic and disease testing, collection technicians, and driving roles supporting the roughly 2,500 people on the road at peak. It's a workforce that touches farms, labs, science, and technology, and every hire has to be right.

"It's our responsibility as a cooperative owned by the farmers of New Zealand to ensure we have good, upstanding people working for our organisation and that our employees and customers are kept safe”, explains Bobbi Ryan, Employee Experience Recruitment Coach at LIC.

Getting the right checks done consistently across that volume adds another layer of complexity. Many seasonal workers are new to New Zealand or on working holiday visas, and work rights verification can't be left to chance.

The Solution

What LIC needed wasn't just a background checking tool, it was a process that could run at scale, stay consistent across a large distributed network of hiring managers, and catch the right issues automatically without central oversight.

Checkmate, integrated directly with LIC's ATS TeamTailor, was the ideal solution.

The right checks are configured per role, selected from within the same system hiring managers are already working in, and submitted in a few clicks. Once results come back, candidates advance to the next stage automatically and the hiring manager is notified to review and approve. The process runs without anyone having to coordinate it.

That automation matters more than it might seem on paper. With hundreds of candidates moving through the system simultaneously during peak season, manual intervention at every step isn't just inefficient, it's impossible.

"You tick the boxes, submit, and Checkmate does the rest. The hiring managers love it”, says Bobbi. 

Work rights verification is part of that same workflow. For any candidate who can't provide a New Zealand passport or birth certificate, a check runs automatically — regardless of what documentation they've presented. With legal exposure sitting with the employer rather than the candidate, that consistency matters.

Real Flags, Real Stakes

When hundreds of candidates are moving through the system simultaneously, the outcomes that matter are the ones that keep the process moving without friction, and the ones that quietly prevent the worst-case scenarios.

Checkmate’s IP address tracking feature has flagged five instances in Bobbi's time where a candidate and their referee shared the same location, a potential indicator that someone is submitting their own reference.

Criminal conviction screening has had even higher stakes. 

"When people tell us that they don't have convictions and it turns out they do, it raises questions about their character, and that’s where we investigate further," Bobbi says. 

One case in particular stood out. A candidate applying for a driving role at LIC declared no criminal history. Checkmate's checks returned a police record that included several drunk driving convictions and an assault charge. 

"That role would have put that person in front of LIC's customers and alongside field staff, a lot of whom are female or young people. It’s a risk that, without Checkmate, potentially would never have surfaced”, says Bobbi. 

The Results

Since moving to Checkmate, LIC's hiring team has seen consistent wins across the things that matter most at volume:

• Faster end-to-end screening: Checks move automatically through the TeamTailor integration, with candidates advancing to the next workflow stage the moment results come back — no manual handoff required.
• Hiring manager independence: Across a large, distributed network of hiring managers, teams now run their own screening from start to finish. Tick the checks, submit, done.
• Instant visibility across hundreds of candidates: A colour-coded dashboard shows the status of every active check at a glance — what's complete, what's outstanding, what needs a closer look — without opening a single individual file.
• Fraud and risk flags that surface automatically: ISP location verification, criminal conviction screening, and driver licence checks catch issues before they become problems, with the team able to investigate rather than assume.

"Checkmate has sped up the recruitment process at the back end. The hiring managers all love the simplicity of it, the ease of using the tool, and the reports they get back. And the other thing I've found personally valuable is that your team is always looking at innovating your process, and your technical team are always looking for ways to improve. I've noticed so many improvements in the year that I've been using Checkmate, and I absolutely love all of them."

And when things do need attention, Bobbi knows the team is there to support.

"I can't speak highly enough about the team at Checkmate. They’re so helpful, they follow up, I get replies in a timely fashion. They highlight things I might not have seen. They're proactive, they're responsive."