Employee referrals are the lifeblood of any growing company. Referrals save enormous amounts of sourcing effort, have a faster time to close, lower cost per hire, and generally stay with the company longer. According to Drafted’s 2017 Referral Program Benchmark Report, aiming for 45% of hires from referrals is the best way to optimize your hiring funnel.
Here are a few steps you can take to ensure you are maximizing your company’s referring potential.
- Grow organically — Candidate referrals should be the starting point for all hiring efforts. Encourage your teams to reach out to their networks before kicking off any agency or sourcing work.
- Be strategic — Help employees think about their networks in a structured way. Coming up with the top 10 people you have ever worked with is a challenging exercise. Asking about great people from past projects, community events, and speaking engagements can yield far more interesting results.
- Simplify the Process — Referring should be intuitive and straightforward. Leverage your ATS functionality and train all new employees on submitting a candidate. In addition, there are platforms like Drafted.us (Lightspeed company) that allow you to quickly search and get introductions to your entire company’s network.
- Build Culture — A strong referral program is a direct representation of a healthy company culture; people refer when they are happy at work. Make the referral process exciting and transparent and don’t underestimate the power of public recognition. Congratulating new hires and their referrers during company all-hands meetings is a great place to start.
If you are in the early stages of building a referral program, a simple way to gain momentum is through a Referral Party — a 1-hour sourcing session where team members contribute as many quality leads as possible. The goal is to generate candidate leads for 1–2 priority roles and remind everyone about the importance of referring.
Below is a template and some tips for throwing your own referral party.
- Keep it to 1 hour, everyone tends to lose interest during anything longer
- Stick to 1–2 priority jobs
- Keep the group manageable, no more than 30 people
- Prep ahead of time. Take the time to find example profiles and create LinkedIn search strings for the team. This can easily be done by building a simple search in regular LinkedIn (not Recruiter) and copying the URL of the search results. Example: 1st Connections & Example: 2nd Connections
- Bring food — everyone loves food
- Make it a competition. There should be a prize for the person who contributes the most leads — Amazon Gift Cards are a crowd favorite. I’d also recommend counting any leads as actual referrals if they get hired.
Happy Hiring!
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