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Employee Referral Process: Powered By ATS

As competition for talent continues to get intense, so does the need for better employee referral strategies and the pivotal role played by next-gen social recruitment software technology.

There is real hiring potential within your current employee base – unlocking this employee referral process with an integrated recruitment software platform can help you find great new talent. Unfortunately, plenty of companies with or without an applicant tracking system that recognize the importance of an employee referral process let this potential opportunity slip through the cracks.

In this guide, we will show you five simple steps to help you springboard your employee referral process and avoid these common pitfalls.

1. Reward Employee Referrals

You will get many more employee referrals if you reward your employees for their contribution to the recruitment process. Keeping track of this activity is much easier when your organization is collaborating on a recruitment software platform and applicant tracking system built to accommodate today’s demanding hiring needs. You will see that incentives in the employee referral process provide great motivation and encouragement to all employees. Offer them new tech products (iPads, iPhones) or a $500-$1000 cash bonus. It’s hard to put a price on company culture, however, you can be almost guaranteed that when your employees are recruiting people they know and trust, the end result will be worth the reward. And if you are familiar with the actual costs of hiring through traditional means, you know that the rewards associated with your employee referral process are worth their weight in gold and nothing compared to any other alternatives.

2. Add outside referrers

Why limit your employee referral process to current employees only? Opening up to past employees and anyone else close to your company can expand your candidate sources as well as the employee referral pool. Managing this entire activity is a lot easier and streamlined when your social recruitment software and applicant tracking system are working together as an integrated solution. The ability to include a variety of referrers is one of the many reasons why social and employee referrals for finding candidates have become so popular. Speaking of which…

3. Consider leveraging your social media profiles

LinkedIn was built on the premise of leveraging social connections for business opportunities. Let your employees and co-workers refer jobs to the right people in their social networks, who can then further share job openings with other candidates they know. You’ll expand your candidates referral pool many fold, even more so if your employees are incentivized in the employee referral process to share the jobs with their social network contacts. Jobs shared via social bring the applicants back to your main applicant tracking system – keeping the whole process functioning in a frictionless way and helping convert more applicants into candidates.

4. Communicate employee referral updates throughout the recruiting process

Make sure to keep in touch with your referrers throughout the entire hiring process with the help of your recruitment software and applicant tracking system. If the candidate they referred has an interview scheduled, let them know. Even if their referral isn’t hired, let them know why. Doing so will give them more insight into your hiring processes (transparency creates a win-win situation), better inform them on any future referrals, and thus leave them more likely to make more candidate referrals in the future. With Simplicant, you are able to easily provide controlled access to different types of users on the recruitment software platform.

5. The final incentive

Consider offering longer-term rewards to those who successfully refer a friend in the employee referral process. This could include paying a special yearly bonus to the referrer for every year their referral stays at the company, or recognizing the employee for their valuable contributions in identifying the right candidates and in the team building process. In our hiring experience, giving such long-term rewards encourages employees to keep participating in the referral program. This simple step has turned rather lackluster programs into competitive and healthy competition among employees. Manage and keep track of your employee referrals and outside referrals with next-gen recruitment software and applicant tracking system from Simplicant.

What are some of the successful employee referral strategies that have worked in your organization?

Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash