Introduction

Normally the burden of recruiting no longer falls solely on the Talent Acquisition team. They put up a JD on the company’s career site, create backlinks on social media and contact recruitment agencies like cajobportal.com for resume that ‘fit the bill’.

It’s been repeatedly demonstrated that referred candidates get hired faster than traditional candidates, are cheaper, and tend to stick around longer too. Most employers hire nearly 40 percent of their staff from employee referrals. Across all company sizes and industries, on average, 24 percent of new hires come from an employee referral

(Percentage of Hires from Referrals)[1]

And there’s absolutely no reason why you must not walk the extra mile to spruce up your employee referral program because it leverages a resource you already have: your employees.

Cross your t’s and dot your i’s

As you look to build or reevaluate your own employee referral program, ensure that it will be a best-in-class program by incorporating the most valued characteristics.

A few pointers in this regard could be

Clear Communication

For employees to participate in the referral program, they need to be kept in the loop and treated as recruiters. They need to know what positions are open, the kind of talent you’re seeking and which skills and backgrounds are the most important. And don’t forget to arm them with an elevator pitch!

The fewer rules the better.

Don’t make it complicated or time consuming. Submitting an employee referral must be a straightforward process. Set clear expectations at the outset so all parties know exactly what to expect and when – then stick to it.

Exceptionally user-friendly process

Take the hassle out of referral submissions, status tracking, and reward fulfillment. An interactive dashboard engages employees with exciting, easy-to-use technology.

Instead of having an employee to upload the resume, you can just have the employee send your talent acquisition team the name and contact, and they can enter it into the ATS.

Say, what if an employee can simply pass on the business card of a great salesperson they ran into in their personal life – such as someone who sold them a car, a watch, whatever – and pass it along to the HR team.

There are utilities today, designed as Chrome extensions, where employees can refer a candidate into the system from a profile on the web or forward resumes from their email straight into the ATS – all without having to contact a recruiter – and follow the candidates they refer to stay in the loop on their connections’ progress.

Ensure that there is no black hole

Millennial workforce wants instant gratification a lack of responsiveness to employee referrals is the #1 program killer.

Employee referrals shouldn’t disappear into the black hole of HR or your ATS. This results in lost credibility with your employees AND your referral.

There are utilities today your employees to glance how all of their referrals are progressing through the process.

It’s best to ensure that each referred candidate to be contacted within a few days, even if it’s with a rejection email.

Dispense swag

By recognizing individuals who go above and beyond, you’ll not only make employees who refer feel appreciated, but also increase your chances of other employees following suit.

Work on the three influential factors – financial, social, and altruistic. This could include cash, gift vouchers, a \”Top Referrer\” t-shirt, a celebratory outing to toast the winner, an additional paid day off or allowing winners to donating to their favorite charity

Here’s how the hire-a-thon works at the USD 100 mn MuleSoft

 

Instead, imagine a situation where the entire company is working just on recruitment for an hour, with each employee scouring his/her professional networks, and supplying you with a list of amazing candidates.  All this and more is possible, thanks to a Hire-a-thon (an innovative slice of the Employee Referral Program) that’s geared to attract eyeballs.

• Everyone stops working for four hours and gets into cross functional and inter-departmental teams of about 10 people.
• Employees scour their LinkedIn networks and flag the best people they’ve ever worked with, in whatever capacity. They also notify their networks that MuleSoft is hiring, helping to spread the word beyond first-degree connections.
• You can submit resume, either against open requisitions or an “other” category for outstanding candidates who don’t match a role.
• Points are given for internal referrals (50 points); external referrals (25 points) and bonus points (50 points) for scheduling qualified candidates directly onto recruiters’ calendars during the hire-a-thon.
• Employees eat as much free pizza as they want during the
• Based on number of employees brought into the system during the 90-day mark, there are rewards galore for the best team as well as the best employee, the latter even winning a slice of MuleSoft equity!

Some innovation in the air

 Dell

Look at those Dell brands its Referral Program. Isn’t it geared to entice.

InMobi

InMobi, the Indian technology company, offered a motorbike to any candidate who successfully referred an engineering manager

To add to the excitement, they actually bought the motorbike and parked it right in the front of their corporate headquarters. Now each day, as an employee walked into work, he/she saw the motorbike. This thus ensured that their employee referral program was always top-of-mind.

Booking.com

Booking.com, the planet\’s #1 accommodation site, needed a customer service representatives who spoke both Portuguese and English to help facilitate their growth in Brazil. Unfortunately, they were having a tough time finding candidates, prompting one intrepid recruiter to get creative.

The recruiting team brought in Portuguese food for lunch for the entire office and left referral cards, asking for more Portuguese-speaking referrals. Viola – it worked!

GoDaddy

To entice widespread buy-in, one of their ideas was a mirror.

The point of the mirror is to highlight that everybody within GoDaddy is responsible for recruiting, not just the recruiting team. And that means employees from all departments should be referring great people.

Also, GoDaddy did things turning recruiting at GoDaddy into a friendly competition, where winners got a GoDaddy #socialrecruiter T-shirt. Or like putting a poster up in code to encourage software engineers to refer, where the code on the poster read (once you decoded it) “If you know of a coder in your network who kicks a–, refer to GoDaddy Recruiting.”

The poster created buzz in the office and became a conversation starter, which helped GoDaddy nearly double the amount of referrals it got.

Google

The HR team at Google “nudges” employees into referring. They ask specific questions that forcibly jog a person’s memory. So, if Google is looking to recruit, they don’t email around the JD but rather ask “Who is the best finance person who ever worked with?”, “Who is the best developer in the Ruby programming language”? This gets a much higher response rate.  [Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live]

Mcafee

In a nutshell, gamification is all about taking engagement learning\’s from the game industry and applying them to non-game environments

The company kind of gamified the entire referral experience

With a uncluttered, tiled view, it brought a refreshing change to how referral jobs have been traditionally seen by employees, easy to tag jobs across various buckets viz. contest jobs, hot openings, etc., Job tiles are crisp, visual and clear about referral bonus and karma points to be won

For an ERP to work, it’s also important to focus on this

Also remember, that for ERP to work, make sure that your existing employees are engaged. If they do not feel good about the place, they\’re not going to subject to their friends to the environment. What kind of friend does that?

With the \”Spreadthelove\” website, Microsoft lets employeeso \”write up\” their own individual story about their career with Microsoft (their story might include pictures, testimonials and video). Employees can then share the web link and \”spread the love\” with targeted friends, family and potential referrals.

Final thoughts

The above examples might just be the tip of the iceberg, with opportunities for innovation being infinite. Remember to run the ERP in the right spirit, make the program delightful and keep it simple. A Portuguese lunch might be the answer

In a nutshell, gamification is all about taking engagement learning\’s from the game industry and applying them to non-game environments

The company kind of gamified the entire referral experience

With a uncluttered, tiled view, it brought a refreshing change to how referral jobs have been traditionally seen by employees, easy to tag jobs across various buckets viz. contest jobs, hot openings, etc., Job tiles are crisp, visual and clear about referral bonus and karma points to be won

For an ERP to work, it’s also important to focus on this

Also remember, that for ERP to work, make sure that your existing employees are engaged. If they do not feel good about the place, they\’re not going to subject to their friends to the environment. What kind of friend does that?

With the \”Spreadthelove\” website, Microsoft lets employeeso \”write up\” their own individual story about their career with Microsoft (their story might include pictures, testimonials and video). Employees can then share the web link and \”spread the love\” with targeted friends, family and potential referrals.

Final thoughts

 

The above examples might just be the tip of the iceberg, with opportunities for innovation being infinite. Remember to run the ERP in the right spirit, make the program delightful and keep it simple. A Portuguese lunch might be the answer

 

About Us

Who we are?

cajobportal.com – India\’s first recruitment website exclusively for finance professionals [CA, CS, CWA & MBA-Finance]

 

[1] https://www.icims.com/sites/www.icims.com/files/public/The%20Impact%20of%20Successful%20Employee%20Referral%20Programs%20FINAL.pdf