Utilizing your current team to find new employees is a widespread practice that has gained much credibility especially in the past few years. If you have great talent on your team, it’s likely that they are connecting with other great talent; either as personal friends, university alumni or via professional industry networking.
Many organizations take advantage of their employees’ natural connection to the company and other like-minded people to expand their reach for new recruits easily and in a very cost-efficient manner.
Every employee is a walking job advertisement. So if you’re not tapping into that potential employer branding channel, here are a few simple steps to get you started.
Key Takeaways:
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Be transparent with your employees about the position that are currently available within the company and that they have access to that information first.
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Ask your employees if they know anyone looking for a job because they may have the perfect candidate in mind.
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Have your employees attend networking events and have them be your personal brand ambassadors.
7 Steps to Turn your Entire Staff Into a Recruiting Engine
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Make Your Employee Experience Awesome
It goes without saying that no one is going to invite their awesome friends or acquaintances to work with them if they don’t feel that your workplace is sufficiently awesome.
The brilliant coder your employee is chatting to at a weekend BBQ isn’t going to be interested in your upcoming position if his friend spent the afternoon offloading his complaints about a controlling boss, shocking benefits, or a demotivating work environment.
What makes your workplace somewhere your employees would want their friends to work? What can your employees boast about at the weekend BBQ?
Don’t just ask your employees to rave about the workplace. Give your employees something rave about!
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Be Completely Transparent About Roles Available
Where possible, create a public job board where every employee can see the positions currently available within the organization. If you have a smaller company, and therefore less roles opening up, send out an update of any new roles in an email to the team. This will ensure every employee reads it and is aware of the vacancies.
Give your employees first access to the information about an available role. There is no benefit to keeping a vacant role secret. One of your star performers may know the perfect candidate for a new role. But if they don’t know there’s even a vacancy … well that’s just a lost opportunity.
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Provide More Detail Than Just A Job Title
There’s an old saying in the recruitment world (when taking a job brief from a hiring manager), that “a job title and a few bullet points do not equate to a job description“. It’s no different when letting your team know what vacancies are currently open in your business.
In order to assess whether their friend might be suitable, your employee will need more detail than just a job title. Ensure you include sufficient information such as who the position reports to, what skills are required, how much experience you are ideally looking for and the ever-important cultural fit requirements such as values and behaviors.
Providing this detail may even jolt a person’s memory that someone in their network has ‘that exact skill’ and may well be interested.
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Keep All Your Available Roles Up To Date
Trust is an important factor when it comes to referring friends. Your employees need to know that the opportunities available are genuine. They don’t want their referral spending a lot of time preparing an application only to be told the position is already at final interview stage or was in fact filled a month earlier.
Ensure the information you are providing to your employees is up to date and accurate. Anything less erodes the purpose of the entire job board to provide your employees with information for the task.
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Ask Your Employees If They Know Anyone
It seems obvious but many employers simply forget to ask! Encourage your team to become your employer brand ambassadors through their own social networks. Employees are known to be reticent about offering personal acquaintances for consideration. They don’t want to be seen as biased. They may also be worried about the fall-out on themselves personally if the recommended friend or colleague doesn’t work out.
Either in a team meeting or through an email communication, explain to your employees that you are completely open to their recommendations of potential hires (even if there is no specific open vacancy at the time) and that you trust their ability to know who would be a good fit for the business.
Of course at the end of any job vacancy announcement, make sure you include the invitation to recommend someone appropriate.
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Referral Programs
Providing formal benefits for your employees is the standard way of encouraging referrals from your team. Not sure if a referral program is the best way to achieve this? Here are 4 reasons you should consider implementing one.
Your business could receive qualified candidates right on your doorstep with a properly designed and implemented Employee Referral Program. The essence of an Employee Referral Program involves providing a reward directly to an employee in return for a candidate they referred being hired for a particular position.
This reward could be any number of different types; one company I know offers $10,000 for any senior candidate referrals after the new employee successfully passes their probation period. This is still a saving of at least 50% compared to a traditional recruitment fee. Another company offers a weekend holiday to an exotic island for the employee and a friend.
Employee Referral Programs should be designed to fit in with the culture (and of course the budget) of the organization, rewarding employees in a way that is personally motivating.
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Pay For Your Team Members To Attend Networking Events
Now that your team members love your workplace, are aware that they can put people forward for opportunities and have a strong incentive to do so, it’s time to get them in front of people who matter.
Assist your team members to meet potential new recruits and become your personal brand ambassadors by sending them to networking events. These could be meet-ups for people of their particular skill set, lunches or networking breakfasts.
If these events need a ticket, pay for it. It will be part of what they boast about to your future new employee and give them one more reason to explain why your workplace is so great!
Recruiting FAQ
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What are the steps in the recruitment process?
The recruitment process involves six main steps and they include:
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Planning
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Sourcing
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Screening
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Selecting
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Hiring
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Onboarding
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What should you do to improve your recruitment process?
To improve your recruitment process, you should be making the job more attractive. If you are finding that no candidate is applying to your job, try making it sound more attractive to candidates. Try highlighting the company culture and what it’s like working there, as well as include any benefits that the job has.
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What is the most important thing to add to a job description?
The most important thing to add to a job description is to add important company details such as company mission, culture, and any benefits that the company provides. Doing this will make the job, as well as the company more appealing to candidates. Most candidates don’t want to apply to a job that their own values don’t align with so including it in the job description will help you get candidates that align with your company.
Candidates also don’t want to wait until after the interview process to know what kind of benefits that the company offers. Your company may be great, but if you don’t provide benefits that candidates want, they will look elsewhere.
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What is the most important step in recruitment process?
The most important step in the recruitment process is the interview step. This is where the candidate will make their first impression to you, but it’s also where you make the first impression for the candidate. Without a good interview experience, a candidate may look somewhere else. While you are interviewing the candidate for the position, it’s important to remember that the candidate is also interviewing you as well.
Final Thoughts
Follow these steps so that when your employees are bragging about your fabulous company to friends and even new acquaintances, they follow it up with, ‘Actually we have a position open right now …’
Author
Paul Slezak
With over two decades of experience in the recruitment and human capital industry, Paul Slezak has established himself as a transformative force in the realm of leadership and career coaching, group facilitation, and talent acquisition. His unique perspective, drawn from his early career as a leader in global recruitment firms and his entrepreneurial success with his own start-up, has enabled him to make a significant impact on leaders, teams, and organizations across the world. Paul's passion for helping others achieve success and high performance is evident in his commitment to transforming leaders and their teams at local, national, and international levels. He specializes in promoting the importance of human-centered intelligence, focusing on soft skills such as authenticity, transparency, and trust to complement business-centered acumen and drive better workplace outcomes. As an impartial facilitator, Paul brings his expertise to team offsites and strategy days, ensuring alignment on goals, values, and culture while keeping participants on task. His engaging and energetic presence, coupled with his unique "entertraining" and "edutaining" delivery style, enables him to connect with audiences both large and intimate, sharing personal and professional anecdotes that inspire and energize.
