Let’s explore some of the things you can do to find success with your referable networks®!
By matching employees to their “referable networks®” recruiters can gain insight into the wider talent pool, boost collaboration, and more importantly, results!!
- Ownership: Assign a project “owner” who is accountable to the success of recruitment. If someone takes the lead then things get done!!
- Old Friends: Start out by working with the same people who already collaborate around referrals. Aim to help them find more people to refer, or them to help you find prospects for direct sourcing. These collaborators can be your Champions!!
- New Friends: Sit down with all new hires to create a new “normal” for referral generation. New hires may be subject to non-solicitation agreements for their most recent employer, but as time goes on the opportunities grow.
- Proof of Concept: Create proof of concept success before pushing to the broader company. Some people are early adopters, others are not. Take your time because as they say, Rome was not built in a day!
- Customer Success: Be sure to work with your customer success manager or project leader from Referable to set goals for activity and usage. Like all recruiting platforms, Referable doesn’t work without the recruiter playing a central role, and goals will help measure success.
- Screening: Invest the time to screen properly. Recruiting is not the employee’s day job, so be sure that you pre-screen and send your colleagues good candidates to refer. Don’t have them second guessing your value by sending them poorly suited candidates.
- Support: Leverage hiring managers to nominate their top employees to support you as you scale. Celebrate their success cases publicly!
- Leverage: Employees are known and trusted by the prospects, so encourage them to make the approach. Leveraging and trusting the team allows recruiters to be more productive and to focus on unknown or lesser known candidates.
- Keep it Simple: You want to get quick wins early on, so start by searching for prospects who appear to have worked within the same division or department as your colleagues. The higher the chance that they know each other, or at least know of each other, the better.
- Bonus: Make sure you pay an adequate bonus for employee referrals. Some employers pay only for the referral, while others pay only when a CV is introduced, and while most referrers do it from their love of their work, the bonus is something people tend to expect. Ideally you can pay a bonus for a referral, and split a bonus if multiple people provided recommendations.
- Targeting: Use Referable to hire from specific companies that have the skills your need, or for diversity hires. The dashboard will show you how you compare to your competitors and peers in the industry, so use that information when strategising with stakeholders.
- Top-Down Support: Get support from senior management so everyone is behind you. It always helps to have the boss make it official.
- Find a Champion: Work closely with the early adopters and make them successful. Make sure their success is known, and have them be your Champion to promote the system to others.
- Keyword Tricks: Use the keyword filters if you are after a specific skill (e.g. Javascript, Python, etc), experience (e.g. Manufacturing sales, Financial Services or FSI, etc), or certification (e.g. “certified”, CCSP, RHCE, etc), or award (e.g. award, president’s club, champion, MVP, etc), or customer name (e.g. SONY, Mizuho, etc). Be creative, but also remember that there will be many prospects who simply do not have this information available. Therefore, while helpful, this shortcut is not the only way to find success.
- Languages: Run keyword searches in multiple languages if relevant (e.g. 賞, 金融, 상, 재원, etc). You will know your market, so apply as appropriate. For example, in Asia-Pacific profiles in Chinese, Japanese, Korean or other languages, will be common.
- Feedback Loop: Provide employees making the referrals or providing feedback with updates on any candidates that proceed with interviews. One of the biggest complaints of employees is not hearing any updates on their referrals, so use the automation that is available.
- ATS Connection: Accessing the ATS will also allow you to update and enrich old candidates from the system. Even if not part of your referable network, those candidates may have been “runner up” in the past, or gone on to build new skills or success. An ATS connection will also automate the feedback loop.
- Update Profiles: Speaking of updates, some candidate profiles will be out of date, and some will read poorly as the owner did not clearly publish their history. Just give the profile a refresh by clicking the “update” button. Note that for fairly obvious reasons of privacy, any candidate who has made their profile unavailable online will be automatically removed when updated.
- Be Ethical: Referable is designed for sourcing new prospects. There are ethical and legal ramifications if used to conduct back door checks on actual job applicants. Be ethical; use Referable wisely.
- Employees as Users: Have employees run their own searches for candidates they can recommend or refer. While you can screen profiles with sufficient information, other profiles that lack detail may still be recognisable by name by those who worked with them.
- Enrichment: Ask the team to add any additional comments, social media profiles, or even contact details, if available. This will all go to help you (both) in the outreach and engagement phase.
- Name Drop: Ask the team members who recommend, but don’t refer good candidates to allow you to mention their name as someone who respects and recommends them. The candidate may ignore your contact, but go to that team member as a trusted source of information. Great!!
- Tag Team: Sometimes a referral can’t be made, and sometimes you may struggle to get the attention of the target candidate. Use the team to “ping” the candidate to meet with you and learn more.
- Search by Name: After searching by Jobs, you can use the looking glass filter button to search by a prospects specific name. This is useful if you find a good candidate from a target company and add them to Referable to see who may know them.
- Sell the Meeting: Sell the information exchange, not the career change! Coming on too strong may scare top candidates away. The first step is simply exchanging introductions and sharing information. One step at a time!!
- Multiple Contacts: Screen prospects through multiple employees to ensure fair results. One person may have a completely different opinion, and we need to avoid bias as much as possible.
- Try the “Soft Sell”: Try using Referable to boost attendance at a virtual recruiting event. Be sure to get the team behind you and have them help with enriching profile information, or directly share your event landing page with high probability candidates.
- Be Strategic: High potential talent sourced from your referable networks will naturally have higher chances of proceeding through interviews. They should be your focus, while you can drive agency partners to source of closed networks and platforms (e.g. job portals).
- Share Feedback: If there are features you want to see in the Referable product road map, let us know!! We aim to develop the best product possible that you – the recruiter – wants to use.
- Celebrate Success: No matter the tools, Recruitment success is a journey, not a destination. Celebrate success along the way and make sure others see the results!! Eventually you will establish a new normal!
This slide also illustrates the process:
Like all recruiting, we need to prepare if we want successful outcomes.
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