…HR ideas from Jeffery Giesener – SourceMob – CEO • April 16, 2014
Today, let’s examine the Employee Referral Program (ERP) and significance of communication in human resources….
- How are you measuring candidate perceptions of your career pages?
- How are you measuring your candidate experience?
Job Candidates, like your consumers, have numerous choices.
No HR focus will impact the corporate bottom line more than converting candidates into hires at the lowest cost and in the shortest amount of time while continuing to fill your talent pipeline.
Gallup researched 300,000 businesses and found that consumers who felt fast food restaurant employees did a great job were 5 to 6 times more likely to return? At banks where employees with great customer service stood out, the customer was 6 to 20 times more likely to continue the relationship. Now THAT’S strategic impact!
HR expert Dr. John Sullivan said, “Identifying how your employees perceive your organization is a key factor to the start of how you want your HR Brand to be perceived by both your employees and your candidates. If there is a misinterpretation, it must be resolved. (Note that resolution does not mean telling the employee they are wrong! Branding relies upon their perception, not yours).”
How to Learn Your HR Brand Reputation
Talk to your employees!
The key is to open up conversations with all levels of staff. Present yourself as the facilitator instead of the enforcer. You have to get out of the HR office and into the world of your organization’s employees.
Finding these answers requires dialogue. That means that HR must communicate! That communication must involve listening and promotion equally.
Top 10 Benefits of an Employee Referral Program (ERP)
(*see references at the end of this section)
- Hire volume — Referrals are the #1 source in hiring volume. [1], [3]
- Hire quality — Referrals are the #1 source for new hire quality.[1]
- Speed – Referrals are the #1 fastest in regards to time-to-fill
- 29 days for referrals, 39 days for job boards, and 45 days for career sites [2]
- Average length of employment of all initial hires after one year (retention) – Referrals are #1
- 46% retention after one one year compared to 33% from career sites and 22% from job boards. [2]
- Average length of employment of all initial hires after two years (retention) – employee referrals are #1
- 45% retention after two years compared to 20% from job boards after two years and 14% after three years. [2]
- Percentage of all applicants –– Referrals make up only 6.9% of applicants [2]
- Percentage of all hires – 46% of all hires at the top performing firms are referrals [4]. When it comes to all firms, they range between 28% [3] and 39.9% of all hires. [2]
- Applicant-to-hire ratio— Referrals are #1
- For top firms, referrals are hired at a rate of 33%
- For average firms, referrals are hired at a rate of 10%
- Compare that to an average applicant to hire ratio of 1 out of 18 from all sources. [4]
- Cost per hire – The average hiring cost of job board hires is $1,671 and the average referral cost is $2,306 (only $635 more). [4]
- Diversity impact – Despite the old myth that referrals have a negative diversity impact, referrals were the #1 “most productive” source for diversity hires….well ahead of major job boards, company affinity groups and diversity career fairs. [3]
Social EXCHANGE™
An employee referral program is one of the most effective ways to expand your job candidate reach. Not only do these programs yield more candidates, they lead to higher quality hires and improved retention rates. If an employee referral program is not in your organization’s recruiting queue, you are overlooking a huge opportunity to build a stronger workforce. What you may also be missing in your ERP program is the use of social and mobile to further broaden it reach.
Simply put, Social Exchange™ significantly enhances your employee referral program by enabling both your employees and your candidates to share your career and conversational postings on the key social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+. That means you have more than 3 billion social profiles that your HR brand can leverage.
FEATURES
Leveraging of Social Networks
Under permission, you can automatically share your job opportunities with all of your employees’ social connections on major networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. This greatly increases your candidate reach, enables passive candidate follows, builds your talent community and engages specific and niche, hard-to-fill audience segments.
Referral Tracking
Social Exchange™provides you with real-time reports on the status of your referral program. Now you will know instantly which employees provided the referral and from what source, further demonstrating your program ROI. In addition, you will be able to direct referral bounties and payments back to your employees.
Permission-Based Communication
Career distribution through social channels is not the only networking function of Social Exchange™. When candidates give you permission, you can email and/or chat with them and direct message them directly via the social network or the mobile device of their choice.
To learn more about SourceMob’s best practices for social and mobile recruiting, give me a call at 612-249-2740 or email me at jeff@sourcemob.com.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Jeffery
Jeffery Giesener
CEO – SourceMob