How to encourage employee referral in your company?

According to a study conducted by iCIMS Hire, 88% of the employers rated employee referrals as their number one source of quality hires, but only 44% of the employers hire through employee referrals. Why do employers, who think highly of employee referral, get lost on the way, leaving this recruitment channel unused to its fullest potential?

On the other side, only 40% of the employees referred someone for an open job within the company they work for, according to a survey conducted by Jobvite. To conclude, employee referral sounds great, everybody loves the idea, but few turn it into action.

What is employee referral, anyway?

Understanding what employee referral is all about is critical for a business that aims at making it part of the recruitment process. Employee referral is more than just whispering to the Recruitment Manager that you may know someone who might be a fit for a particular role within the company. Employee referral is an internal recruitment method used to identify candidates through the network of the company’s employees. So, it should be a recruitment channel built through constant efforts on both sides, recruiters and recommenders.

In fact, there are two levels of employee referral:

• Soft employee referral, where employees’ participation might translate into: “I don’t know anyone specifically for this open role, but I might just spread the word about it. Maybe something will come out.” This type of involvement was stimulated by the social media, which redefined how we network. Designed initially for staying in touch online with people we already knew offline, social networks are now largely used to connect also with people we don’t know. As a result, we tend to build broader networks than in the past, when social media did not exist. On the other hand, although it is easy for your employees to reach their network through social media, don’t assume they will do it, unless they consider it’s worth the effort.
• In-depth employee referral, closer to the traditional pattern, could translate into: “I know someone who fits in this role.” If they choose to refer or not, this depends on how engaged your employees are and how much they are willing to support the recruitment process.

4 ways to determine more people to make employee referrals

The three main reasons why employees don’t refer are:

• they don’t know how
• the process is too complicated to follow through
• they lack the motivation

Naturally, businesses will have to work around these three drawbacks to get their employees look at referral as a general practice rather than a one-time event. Here are a few tips on how to turn employees into brand ambassadors and dependable referrers for the open jobs.

1. Provide employee referral tools

The days when you were leaving your friend’s CV on a recruiter’s desk are gone. Time is an important asset for everyone, so don’t expect your employees to take from their work or after-work hours to do the business a favor, no matter how happy they are with your company.

Don’t expect employees to go to the company’s careers page several times and share the open job description with each of their online networks. Or even worse, expect them to draw up themselves the announcement targeted at their network.

In an era of ‘busyness,’ having the tools to make employee referrals in one click is a must. In Talentspotting referral software, your employees can share the open jobs on all their online networks, upload a friend’s resume or email the open job, all from the same window.

2. Double your employee referral campaigns by a strong communication strategy

Too often employee referral is seen exclusively as an HR task. In fact, the successful implementation of an employee referral program is the result of joined efforts of the recruiters and the marketing team. Having a good referral strategy is the first step, communicating it is the second one.

At some point, Dell decided that their employee referral process was not optimized and implemented a series of measures meant to brush it up:

• They assigned a specific recruiter in charge of employee referral, program communication and training for each region.
• They intensified communication around employee referral programs through graphics outlining the flow and the benefits; bi-weekly emails sent to employees including open jobs and info on how they could recommend candidates; bi-monthly newsletters to the regional recruitment teams.
• they created buzz through internal career fairs and family and friends recruitment events.
• Top contributors were publicly recognized as “referral rock stars”.

3. Offer transparency on the status of the referrals

LinkedIn conducted an internal survey to find out what type of info employees expected from the recruitment team after making a referral. 83% said they wanted an update when the candidate is rejected or accepted, 60% asked for an update at each stage of the recruitment process, and 76% asked to receive a confirmation about the receipt of the application.

It is obvious that people expect transparency on how things go, after making a referral. From the recruiters’ perspective, these expectations may be daunting. One of the purposes of having an employee referral program is to save time, but having to answer and then update each referrer would just have the opposite effect.

What if, instead of manually processing each recommendation, an intelligent system would do that for you? In Talentspotting solution for employee referral, both recommenders and candidates receive pre-defined feedback and automated status updates.

When employees who recommend don’t feel like they’ve sent an application to a black-hole, they are likely to be hooked and engaged in your next referral campaigns as well.

4. Give incentives

Although successful employee referral is often financially rewarded, it seems that money is not the first driver for referring. According to the same internal survey conducted by LinkedIn, 76% of their employees refer to help someone get to work for their company, and 68% make referrals to help the company. Only 40% refer having in mind the bonus they’ll get.

Helping is a behavior derived from our hardwired community spirit, and there are very few things a company can offer that may exceed the satisfaction of helping. As Liz Ryan, Founder and CEO of Human Workplace and the author of “Reinvention Roadmap” writes in an article published in Forbes , “when you hire the friends of your friends, the original employee gets a bonus, and he or she gets something else. S/he gets to say ‘Yeah, I got my friend a job’ which is a pretty cool thing to say and a great feeling to have. You build glue in a company that way. “

Offering public recognition is one of the best ways to reward contributors to the employee referral programs. First, because it resonates the most with people’s expectations, secondly because it is a way to outline good practices and to drag others into becoming the employer’s brand ambassadors.

Encouraging referrals should be done by rewarding not only the outcomes (like hiring) but also the simple fact of contributing to a referral campaign. KPMG encouraged participation to the employee referral program with small gift cards, while Booking.com went the extra-mile and rewarded employees in advance. They invited all the Portuguese speaking team members out for lunch and left them a note, asking them to refer someone they might know for an open job in Brazil, that was particularly difficult to fill in.

The sky is the limit when it comes to rewarding your employer brand ambassadors. And we mean it literally because you can go from offering small incentives to cash bonuses and to once in a lifetime experiences like paragliding or helicopter rides. Each business should take the time to assess and identify the rewards that meet employees’ expectations and reflect also the company’s culture.

A person has, on an average, 150 Facebook friends and 400 LinkedIn connections. This means that a medium company of 100 employees would reach an audience of 55,000 people, if all its employees are active brand ambassadors. That is a huge impact you can make with minimal costs and maximal attention for building an articulated employee referral strategy, sustained by performant technology, communication and a healthy organizational culture.

Talentspotting can help you implement employee referral programs that make sense, through software encompassing automated matching algorithms between jobs and candidates and automated social media referral. Contact us to request a demo or discuss further details.