Blog Posts

Social Recruiting Referral

Most organizations prefer referrals as a great source of prospective candidates. Often, the main reasons cited are quality vs. quantity. There is even so much support for these types of candidates that employees often receive additional compensation for referring the right talent to the organization. So, the key question, is there a way to replicate employee referrals to meet the ongoing hiring needs of the organization?

The Knowledgeable Employee (best recruiting asset)

Employees at a company typically have a great deal of insight about the inner workings of an organization. They have gone through a process that includes: research, recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and on-the-job work experience. As such, employees are a natural way of communicating company mission, vision, values, culture, skills, and experience beyond the walls of an organization. This depth of knowledge is what enables companies to receive great referrals from their employee base.

In an ideal world, most organizations would probably prefer to get all their new hire recommendations via referral. However, the reality is that this is simply impossible. Typically employees throughout an organization aren’t privy to the total hiring needs of the organization. They might be aware of hiring at the department or functional level. But, rarely is an individual employee aware of every single open position at a company.

Even if they were aware of every single opening that doesn’t guarantee that they will have someone within their network who would be a good fit. So, in order to meet the ongoing hiring needs, employers must look to a variety of additional methods.

The Porous Organization

In order to emulate the success of employee referrals, it is necessary to understand the basics of what makes the program successful.  The insight into the organization that employees have gained by initially being attracted, recruited, and retained at a company.

To me, one of the best ways to share this information is through the targeted use of social media and social networking. While the data set can’t necessarily be as rich, the behind—the-scenes insights that are provided about the organization can be utilized in a variety of ways.

In addition to the insight, there is often compensation associated with a successful employee referral. While this could also be utilized within a social recruiting campaign, there is also very valuable social capital to be earned by being a great resource for members within a connected community. Those that are able to connect members within their network to amazing opportunities earn a great deal of respect and increased social standing. Augmenting that with compensation would simply be the icing on the cake once those key influencers are identified.

The Referral

By creating broad-based interest in your organization, users connected to your company can share openings with their network. Those who have an interest in your industry and specifically your company’s role within the industry already have gathered a great deal of information so that when there is a hiring need, they will already know that your organization is at the top of their list. Current employees can stay current on hiring needs in a much more natural (i.e. social) way than having to read through internal job postings or hear about openings through the grapevine. So, when positions become open that are outside of their current department; they are much more likely to connect the dots to others that may already be in their network.

While organizations can not hire all of their employees through referrals, social recruiting seems to be a natural evolution of the model in that the information shared about an organization simulates that which current employees have gathered through an ongoing relationship. By building a social media and social networking powered recruiting function, the number of quality hires should increase as digital filtering and social principles begin to dominate the web-based interactions.

What are your thoughts? Can Social Recruiting be a valuable addition to organization referral programs? What do you think would tip the scales for success? What will be the biggest challenge in socializing the recruiting process?

-Omowale Casselle (@mySenSay)

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About the Author: Omowale Casselle is the co-founder and CEO of mySenSay. We help top companies and future leaders make better employment decisions.