Building an employee referral program

Setting up an employee referral program for small to medium sized companies

Introduction

• Average employee referral programs deliver about 20% of all new hires.

• Great employee referral programs deliver over 50% of all new hires.

• Your employees are already connected to many of the people you want to hire.

• People want to help. They just need some guidance.

Define goals

• Identify the roles you want to fill using referrals.• Define how many new hires through referrals you

aim to achieve and in what time frame.• Convince your CEO/CFO of the benefits.

1

Define rewards

• Will you give employees a reward when candidates are brought to interview or only when they are hired?

• Sample rewards for getting a candidate to interview stage motivates staff and can be a token such as gift cards, movie tickets etc.

• It’s best to pay rewards immediately. Skip the long wait. It’s a huge disincentive.

2

What reward?

• The best rewards to offer depend on your company.• Sometimes it’s recognition.• Sometimes it’s a charitable donation.• Often it’s plain old fashioned cash.• Rewards for hiring a professional are usually in the

region of $600 to $2000.• Experiment to see what works best for your network.

Define your message

• Referrals help employees bring people they like into the company.

• Referrals are a great way to reach people who are not actively looking for work.

• Referrals are usually a better culture fit, stay longer and get productive faster.

• Referral programs help the company hire the right people to get the projects done.

3

Select champions

• Identify well connected employees–Who has 500+ LinkedIn connections?–Who’s active on Twitter?–Who’s likely to have a lot of friends in Facebook?

• Talk to these employees. Tell them about your plan. Get their buy in.

• Roll out a pilot with these pioneers.• They will encourage others to follow.

4

Abandon Prejudice

• You will likely get results you didn’t foresee.• We’ve seen referral programs deliver 90% of

candidates from employees simply adding names into Zartis.

• We’ve seen programs deliver the majority of candidates from Facebook.

• We’ve seen programs deliver the majority of candidates from Twitter (our own, in fact).

All referrals are not created equal

• Social referrals can mean any of the following:– An employee adds a person’s details into Zartis.– An employee invites a specific person to apply

for a role via email or LinkedIn and the person applies.

– An employee posts a public message to LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter that anybody can see and anybody can apply from.

Follow Up Fast

• Zartis flags all candidates that are referrals and shows who referred them.

• Follow up with them within one working day.• Provide feedback to your referring employees.• Not following up or failing to provide feedback will

destroy any referral program.

5

Final thoughts

• You absolutely need CEO buy in and get them to communicate the importance of referrals to all staff.

• Change rewards to keep it fresh.• Random prizes work, e.g. iPad for first employee

that refers a person that’s hired.• People naturally want to help. Set them up for

success.

6

For the CEO or CFO

Why employee referrals are best

• Reach people not actively looking for work • Better culture fit• Lower attrition/higher retention• Up to 75% cheaper than agency fees• Average referral programs deliver 20% of new hires• Best practice programs deliver over 50%• Zartis helps “move the referral needle”

The business case

• Low initial investment• High potential ROI• Proven high success rate/low risk• Short implementation cycle• Clear accountability measures• Creates competitive advantage• Impact on corporate performance

Case StudyDommo – Madrid based ad agency

Case StudyVersion 1 – IT consulting and managed services

Next Steps

We’d love to help your company to grow. To see how we can help you, email [email protected]

Thanks for readingJohn Dennehy