This commercial from IBM illustrates a profound recruiting truth: many employees have social networks to which they belong, but which are seldom built or leveraged to the employer’s advantage. TalentWoo discusses 5 compelling reasons why it is absolutely essential for your company to adopt a well-defined, operational, and highly visible employee referral program (ERP), and specifically one built around social networking:
1. Cost Per Hire is drastically reduced. Think about the difference in cost between using a retained or contingency firm, online job board postings, contract recruiters or any combination of the preceding vs. paying a referral fee to an existing employee.
2. Quality of Hire is drastically increased. Your employees will usually only put their name on something that won’t come back to bite them or tarnish their professional reputation. Most employees are also personally invested in the success of their company or department, and are therefore more likely to bring aboard talent that helps the company move forward. Lastly employee referrals will likely be more vetted, more closely aligned to the job responsibilities, and more likely a culture fit (as the employee has the benefit of knowing both your company culture and the candidate’s persona).
3. Time to Hire is drastically shortened. According to the Jobvite Index 2012 the time to hire was 29 days for referrals, 39 days for job boards, and 45 days for career sites.
4. Retention Rate of Hires is measurably improved, as employee retention rates increase by 25% when they are employee referrals, according to findings from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)
5. Diversity of Hires come most frequently from employee referrals, rather than job boards or diversity career events, according to a CareerXRoads survey from 2011.
Social network recruiting is perhaps the easiest, and most efficient method of engaging employees in your company’s existing Employee Referral Program. Your referral program should easily integrate social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn into your existing applicant tracking system and online job marketing efforts. To find out more about how TalentWoo can help your company double your employee referral rate by leveraging our best-in-class, online recruiting platform and digital marketing services, please contact us today.