Your Internal Networks Are Bigger Than Your Social Networks
Hiring has traditionally had a more external focus rather than internal, which is why organizations have had to maintain large recruitment teams to comb through virtually millions of resumes on social network databases. Only 1 out of an average 50 resumes make it to the recruitment round and even then the chances of getting hired are marginal. The amount of time and resources that the organization spends trying to sift through heaps of resumes just to find a handful of good candidates can prove to be very costly for the company and not very effective either. Recent studies have shown that organizations can improve their hiring efforts by several notches by shifting their focus to internal networks rather than social networks.
Leveraging internal networks through employee referral programs can help organizations pull in more relevant profiles without having to spend a lot of time and resources sifting through piles of resumes. This is because these profiles are referred by employees whose understanding of the organization and the job ensure that their candidates are likely to fit the bill.
Employee connections can actually be of greater value from a recruiting standpoint than social network databases as these connections very often comprise of people from similar backgrounds, people they have either studied with or worked with in the past. Very often these are exactly the kind of skill sets the organization is looking to hire. Social network databases comprise mostly of people who are actively looking for a job, so posting an ad on social networks can fetch you tones of such profiles whether they fit the bill or not. With employee referrals however, employee connections more often than not consist of people who are not actively looking for a chance, but, based on employee recommendation, can be made to consider the job opening.
Not only are employee networks more relevant for the organization, they are also more cost effective since there is no payment involved to an external party. Referral bonuses are based on employee discretion and are generally but a small portion of what the organization would normally have to pay for a job ad or to an external agency. By making employees participate in the recruiting process, the quality of hiring goes up significantly bringing in much better candidates and helping the organization deliver much better business results.
An organization is only as good as the team it employs, so if you are looking to hire a first class team there is no better way to go about it than to use your first class employees to refer other first class candidates for employment.
