We’ve looked at the ways in which recruiters often ask for referrals and how “targeting” helps, but let’s look at how an agency recruiter might be able to use Referable to win more referrals.
Blue Ocean Strategy
Referable is an app that allows recruiters to collaborate to win referrals at scale. By sharing prospect lists made up of a would-be referrers corporate alumni and making the referrers part easy, Referable is a hack to get to high performing talent faster. Referable enables recruiters to build their own market maps and talent IP.
This method to solicit referrals gives recruiters a unique point of differentiation, and the opportunity to pursue a blue ocean strategy. So long as the recruiter is capable of building a trusted network of advocates, the process is simple.
Democratising Best Practices
As Referable’s AI functions improve and will be introduced to take over the screening process, for now at least the recruiter or their sourcing partner screens profiles and assigns them to long or shortlists appropriately. For example, if the profile is an obvious slam dunk for a given role they could be sent directly to a shortlist for sharing, but if there are a few question marks they could be sent to a long list for the recruiter to double check later.
A shortlist should be curated so that it holds high probability prospects within it. The shortlist is shared with the referrer who can view the prospects on any device and in any language as per their browser settings. All they need to do is recognise which people they know and recommend, and which they do not. If the referrer is reminded of someone else, they can easily just add them to the list. It literally takes just a few clicks.
This is standard practice for a corporate recruiter, though without the right tools it can be a clumsy process. Generally for an agency recruiter such tools do not exist, which is where Referable can be an opportunity for agency recruiters to win referrals in the same way that in-house corporate recruiters do it: at scale.
Sourcing with Candidates
Candidates are the obvious choice for submitting referral requests. So long as the candidate trusts the recruiter they are usually happy to oblige – with or without a potential referral bonus as a sweetener. Any candidate that is well known could be a helper. Certainly a candidate who has been recently placed by the recruiter and is thankful to them for their work will have great potential as a referrer.
The referrer may know the target prospect well and be happy to introduce them, or they may prefer simply to recommend them without any actual introduction. As mentioned in another post talking about the value of recommendations, any information that helps a recruiter pin down which prospects are and which are not suitable to their searches, is valuable as a time saver.
Sourcing with Hiring Managers
The same is true for hiring managers who may be happy to help on their own searches. By adding members of their personal network and building shortlists around them, hiring managers can leverage their friends and colleagues to help identify the top candidates. This works well in a retained search scenario and in cases where the hiring manager has autonomy over how they hire. For example, for a Financial Services Industry Sales Director search we recently built an 80 candidate long list of candidates with direct connections to the hiring manager, their regional peers, and a couple of friends. It took only a short amount of time and immediately gave the recruiter a playbook to launch the search.
By exploring the networks of their socio-graphs, Referable gives hiring managers the ability to collaborate with the recruiter and identify which candidates are a priority for approach, and may even get an introduction. Critical to all of this collaboration is having a simple platform by which to communicate.
Referable AI has been developed by a team experienced in executive search, RPO, in-house recruiting and HR tech to help both in-house and agency recruiters to solicit more referrals faster than ever. If you would like to learn more, drop us a line at hello(at)referable.ai
