Should Your Employee Referral Program Be Necessarily Social?

By Author: savio vadakkan
Total Articles: 58
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It is human tendency to share interesting information and experiences of our daily lives with each other. We are intrinsically driven to tell people about things we greatly liked or disliked and seek the same from others. It is this anthropoid nature that sites like Facebook and Youtube seek to leverage by including Like and Share buttons for people to be able to easily share instantly whatever they have liked.

In a people centric function like recruitment, it makes even more sense to capitalize on employee’s inherent desire to refer and share by integrating social features into the recruitment platform. It enables employees to share job postings within their entire social network and invite them to refer people in turn from their social connections who fit the job description. The absence of social features in your recruitment software on the other hand severely restricts and limits the size of talent pool that accessible to an employee.

Today, there are millions of people on popular social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and You Tube. Social media connects the entire world, linking ...
... people together just at a click of the mouse. LinkedIn today has become the new monster with 3 new users per second, Facebook is approaching one billion users and Twitter has gone ahead to become a media platform where people of this generation log onto to read news on tweets rather than tuning into any news channel. Word of mouth has become the word of web, which clearly indicates the immense reach social media has today.

All this clearly signifies that within five years, social media recruiting has gone from niche to mainstream. It is a one-point connection place that has maximum number of people present due to the varied connections on different social media sites. Now, just imagine the pool of talent that an organization can tap into just by integrating their employee referral solution program with the social media platform.

Including social features into your employee referral program not only leads to faster and better hiring in most cases, but also provides a significant opportunity to organizations for promoting their employer brand within the social network of their employees thus having a successful employee referral program.

The greatest advantage accruing from enabling social connections within your referral program is that it increases accessibility to a greater number of candidates. Automation makes it even easier and simpler to share and post jobs on social networks, providing access to a large pool of people quickly and easily increasing awareness regarding the job and company among a greater number of people. Newer technologies even provide for smart search through algorithms that make it easy for employees to match the skills sets required against candidate profiles to come up with the best fits from their connections.

Integrating social media features into the employee referral programs also provides a significant opportunity to organizations to expand the scope of the referral program to include former employees and even vendors. Social applications allow the organization to share job openings with business connections who in turn can tap into their network to refer suitable candidates.

Employee referral programs are good to start with but there is a limitation to the number of people your employees may know. While your internal network can provide referrals, the external network which is often neglected often multiplies the scope of finding quality and diverse potential hires. That is where an employee referral program which is social becomes successful.

Newer tools and techniques that enable organizations to leverage social connections in smart ways are fast emerging. For instance technologies that seek to help employees locate hidden connections that match the requirement or even link up users with similar interests through virtual events have already become part of referral program features. This is making it even more imperative for organizations who have not yet gone social to adopt the social route for employee referral programs else they risk being left behind in the race for talent.

Author Bio :

Savio Vadakkan is the Marketing Professional at ZALP, a unique employee referrals solution. ZALP helps organizations to establish a successful employee referral program using advanced social media recruiting techniques.