As we all know, good candidates and engaged employees tend to know referrals who could be a great fit for your organisation; not only will the referral know more about your business and roles already, but the fact they already know someone at a prospective employer can make all the difference with onboarding and retention!
So, how to best harness the power of referrals from associates within your organisation? Read on to find out how you can tap into this great talent resource!
Encourage Referrals through Comms
It may surprise you, but your associates may not immediately think to refer candidates to your open roles and talent pools – this doesn’t mean they don’t want to; they just may not know it is an option or even how to refer someone to your business!
So, how to best highlight your openness for candidates being referred to your organisation? Firstly, it is important to get the word out there! This can be actioned by a variety of means, including internal poster and email campaigns, as well as by line managers discussing this in their team meetings and day-to-day discourse.
Encourage Referrals through Reward
In addition to an internally led comms approach to secure referrals, many organisations make the best of this by encouraging referrals through reward; this could be set up in a variety of guises. For example, you could offer a cash incentive, vouchers, an extra day’s holiday, prizes and more!
Whilst one may imagine your associates would just be willing to refer candidates to your organization, it goes without saying that referral schemes that have some form of incentive for the referrer (as well as maybe the individual referred) could yield a higher amount of prospective candidates; as referred candidates are less likely to be 90 day attrition risks, could the costs you would save by not recruiting be returned to the person who referred?
Now you have referrals coming your way, how best to prioritise and administer them? Well, that’s where technology will be your best friend, especially in the guise of an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). When collecting referrals, remember that the person who is referring is not likely wanting to fill out a huge form when they are essentially ‘helping you out’, so it is important to have a configurable and customizable interface where referral details can be easily deposited.
It goes without saying that if an associate has referred someone to your organisation, they will want to know at what stage their referral is in the selection space – once again, an ATS could be your friend here! It would be important to have an interface within your system that provides a certain level of transparency to the individual doing the referring; not only does this create real-time overviews but will save you time on being chased up and manually updating individuals.
Furthermore, it would be wise to have instant reporting to show you where referrals are in your recruitment processes and who has been doing the most referring as part of your referral rewards schemes. This approach can also give you an overview of how much impact referrals are having on your recruitment efforts!
If you would like to encourage more referrals through engaging internal communications or have the opposite problem and are drowning in referrals but struggling to administer them, then look no further than Webrecruit!
We can offer market-leading advice on internal communications best practice around referrals as well as get you engaged with Webrecruit ATS which has an intuitive referral interface to best collect and collate referrals – get in touch today!
