Recruitment: The Number-One Job For All Employees
As an employee, one of the most important parts of your job may surprise you. You’re a star performer, hitting your targets and generally being the best at what you do. Beyond that, what’s the most valuable task you can do to add value to your company? The answer lies in helping attract other talented people.
How you can empower your company through quality referrals
We know the hiring manager is the one with the requirement, writes the job description and ultimately is responsible for deciding who gets hired. However, think of yourself — the employee — as a brand ambassador. You’re the one with the experience. You’re the one who translates the message of your organization to the public on a daily basis. You’re even the one who can truly say what it’s like to work in a certain position, particularly if it’s the same position that needs to be filled.
According to Thomas Boyle, director of product marketing at SilkRoad,
“It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that employee referrals are the number one target; those candidates come with built-in recommendations and in many cases have already been sold on your culture and know more about your company than the average external candidate. And those candidates typically hold the highest retention rates as well.”
In addition, employees are the ones who can truly speak of the organization based on firsthand experience. Using your network, you can harness the best and the brightest to add to the team. After all, if you’re a great performer, chances are someone you know is as well. But, how can you do your own version of recruiting, without it feeling like a full-time job?
Here a few tips according to Kes Thygesen, the co-founder and Head of Product at RolePoint, a tool that allows recruitment managers to socially power their hiring to increase the number and quality of employee referrals:
Suggest a referral program
A referral program is just what it sounds like: a program designed to encourage employees to refer friends, co-workers, and members of their network to a job in exchange for some sort of reward. Suggest this to the hiring manager for this reason: it gives everyone more motivation to do more referring, besides maintaining company culture and helping the organization move forward.
In addition, the referral program gives you all the tools necessary to bring forth the right applicants, such as a completed hiring site, proper job description, links to company materials, etc. This helps you to relay the company message on top of just saying, “this is a great workplace.” Additionally, referral programs typically have rewards that range from a mention in the company newsletter, to a bonus, to a half-day on Friday.
A referral program obviously isn’t a requirement, but it does allow you to feel like you’re being honored for your efforts and gives you a reason to continue providing quality leads.
Start a conversation
The words of employees can do wonders for an organization. Creating and distributing interesting content about the company helps start a conversation and communicated the company culture. For instance, you can blog about your experiences with the organization and relay what a candidate needs to do in order to be successful. When there’s information like this, it can be linked to your referrals so they know exactly what they need to do to land a spot in your organization. Plus, you can speak to these referrals in a more casual fashion, as opposed to a standard job description. It’s makes the whole process a lot easier for both parties.
Take advantage of your social networks
Social networking is a key component in the recruiting space and you need to foster this within your internal network. Further, there are social recruiting tools out there that allow you to see who’s the best fit for the particular position based on the people in your network.
This works well in two ways. First, it makes it easy for employees to actually do the searching because the work is essentially done for you. Second, once you find a match, you can vouch for the potential candidate since you already know them. There’s no background research necessary, which makes your job easier and allows you to confidently give those quality candidates to your employer.
Take on a bad employee and a work environment could stumble or even fall apart. However, by hiring a remarkable employee by way of a referral, an organization can flourish since these workers are pre-approved, have already demonstrated they are outstanding, and will probably work well with the established team. In the end, referrals work out in everyone’s favor.
The infographic below is through Jobvite
