Hiring Through Employee Referrals Saves Time!
The recent Global Employee Referral Index 2013 survey, conducted by Zalp, which had participation from more than 1000 organizations across the US revealed that companies with employee referral programs tend to close positions faster than the ones which don’t have the same level of focus on this recruiting source. Typically, a recruiter will spend precious work hours sifting through the reams of resumes in their inbox through a job site or an advertisement. Sometimes, most of the resumes are not relevant and it’s a tedious task to sit through doing this mundane chore. Alternatively, under an employee referral process, a current employee will only share a resume that is relevant and would fit into the company’s culture as they are aware of the same. Typically, when the HR team receives a referral from internal sources, it clearly gets highlighted and someone takes out time to survey it well thus expediting the process.
Today, many HR teams are lean and have few people in recruitment or talent acquisition functions. This leads to a bottleneck when it is hiring in number or for critical positions. A timely hire is a critical aspect of maintaining the productivity and agility of any organization. A delay sometimes can result in a glaring deficit of talent affecting the output of a project, product or process. This factor needs to be borne in mind while planning your hiring strategy. Hiring from employee referrals is not only time effective but in the long run, very beneficial in keeping the dynamic flow of talent coming into the organization.
Sometimes, recruiters find themselves in a fix over the multiple resumes in front of them delaying the short listing process as they will need to do the initial screening thoroughly. When the same is from an employee referral campaign, you have easy access to the employee and can quickly reach out to get basic details before proceeding to reaching out to the candidate. There are multiple advantages of leveraging a stable and robust employee referral program. Typically, each position requires a flow and process to it, but via employee referrals a huge chain can be eliminated which is to attract the right resumes for the right jobs. It’s like an instant sorting that takes place. With employee referral technology and tools, this process becomes more mature, efficient and result oriented.
In the case of experienced professionals and senior level talent, this process needs to be speedy. A huge lag between initiating dialogue and the interview stage can affect the relationship with a senior professional, hence tarnishing the company’s image. All companies, irrespective of their size wish to make their recruitment simple and agile. There is a huge amount of resource loss in doing the basics; they would rather have their HR teams concentrate on effective and faster employee referrals. The turnaround and the propensity for the recruitment to close is much higher with employee referrals. So go ahead and spend some time in developing a good employee referral program to speed up the hiring process in your company.
Get free access to employee referral whitepapers and webinars to stay updated on recent trends on employee referrals. To find more on employee referrals, visit zalp.com/employeereferralresources
