Too Many Referrals? Three Ways To Channel Them Effectively

Employee Referrals have long been considered the most effective channel for hiring top quality talent. Roughly two-thirds, or 63 percent, of the organizations have a documented referral program, and on average 23% of hires originate from a referral. Organizations with strong employee driven and collaborative hiring culture see upwards of 40% of hires from referrals.

While having a solid pool of referred candidates is a great strategic victory for the recruiting teams, there are several tactical measures that we see some of our high-growth, unicorn partners deploy to handle high volume of referrals effectively.

Realistic SLAs

Almost every organization has some kind of SLA for recruiting teams on employee referrals, but, frankly, these SLAs are from a time when referrals were few and far between. Modern day technology has made identifying and engaging talent for employees effortless and rewarding. This technological advance has lead to high volume of referrals. Referred candidates also have additional context, for example, relationship with employees, their preferred job choice, etc. Processing referred candidates properly takes time, and hence a realistic, rather than an aggressive SLA, will result in better hires.

Organize and Prioritize

There are many ways to organize the referred candidates. Here are a few:

• Referrals that went to school with your employees.
• Referrals that worked with your employees.
• Referrals connected to multiple employees in your organization.
• Referrals from a diverse background, etc.

Present day referral technology provides for automatic organization of referrals based on predefined criterion. This helps organizations to align their referral recruiting with strategic organizational goals.

Personalize Candidate Experience

Delay in getting in-touch with referred candidates might adversely affect organization’s talent brand. More and more organizations are realizing that their talent brand is no longer disjoint from their consumer brand. Who can forget the massively successful “What’s the Matter with Owen?” campaign which resulted in 66% month over month increase in traffic to GE’s recruiting site.

Humanization is the best personalization. When it comes to referrals, the human link is already there. This should be leveraged in a personalized message that goes out to referred candidates. Again, present day technologies enable recruiting teams to personalize in a more data-driven fashion than ever.

At Simppler, personalization and experience is at the heart of our product. Learning through user behavior, we have build metadata which allows recruiters to quickly narrow-in on the high value targets.