Struggling with Recruitment? Try a Referral Program
Recruitment in Vancouver and Recruitment in BC is tough. An excellent way to attract employees to your organization is through a referral program. If you are struggling to recruit the best way to source out talent is to tap on the shoulders of your current employees and find out who it is that they know, who might be looking for work.
Why Employers Like Referral Programs
Retention: From the employer’s perspective we see referral programs ranked as number one in retention rate after one year. Which means those employees who come to your organization through a current team member are more likely to still be there a year later.
Best Cultural Fit: Why would cultural fit be ranked best? Easy. Because who knows more than your current employees about what it's like to work in your organization than your current employees? Not even you! So those current team members aren't going to be recommending to their friends, family, past colleagues, peers and acquaintances to come and work with you if that current employee doesn't already think that that person would be a good fit.
Highest Quality: In one study from Workopolis, one out of every five referrals got the job. To put that in perspective one of our clients gets 3,000 applications a year. 3,000 for maybe 20 roles which makes it 1 to 150. 1 to 5 is amazing!
It Goes Both Ways
From the candidate perspective referral programs are also a sound idea. In a survey by Talent Technology Canada, candidates ranked referral programs as their preferred way of entering into an organization. That means that referral programs edged out applying through corporate career sites, applying through newspaper advertising, applying through job sites, applying through Twitter and other social media. Why? For the exact same reason that the programs work on the employer side, because their friends aren't going to recommend that they apply for a job if they don't think that it's going to be a good fit for them. Current employees don’t tell their friends about job openings when the business is a crummy place to work – and when candidates apply blind through job sites they may very well be applying at a crummy place to work.
How do you kick it off?
The questions really are: how do you engage current employees within the hiring process and how do you ensure that they're giving you quality leads?
Make Participation easy: Share links to job openings with your current team is a way that makes it easy for them to either re-post or forward to their networks.
Create Cool Job Descriptions: Make sure you aren’t writing your postings and job descriptions so boring that watching paint dry seems more exciting than working for you. Use active words, show people the significance of what they will be doing – sell the job!
Provide Recognition: If an employee brings someone in, give them a shout out in a newsletter or on social media through a tweet to say thank you, or even mention it out loud in a meeting.
Provide Incentive: If you can swing it, give the employees a little token of thanks. It doesn't have to be a big wad of cash (but it can!) One of our client’s gives the current employee and the new employee a gift card for dinner and a movie once the new employee has passed their probation. What way can you say thank you that won’t break the bank and fits with your culture?
Provide Feedback to employees: if they are recommending inappropriate candidates, tell them. Give your employees a list of attributes you are looking for and if they miss the mark let them know why.
Referral programs can really work to bring solid talent to your business. You just have to spend a little time up front to kick off a solid program. (and if that doesn’t work – call us… we can help recruit amazing talent for you!)
