REFERRAL RECRUITMENT

Last year due to economy slowdown, many people-from HR professionals, to Managing Partners lost their jobs. This also lead to a new kind of recruitment process called REFERRAL RECRUITMENT.
Today the focus of any recruitment strategy includes, next to creating a strong employer brand, using your own employees and its network to hire new talent into your organisation.
An employee referral scheme encourages a company's existing employees to select and recruit the suitable candidates from their social networks. As a reward, the employer typically pays the referring employee a referral bonus. This is the start of the company’s recruitment process where, at no cost to the employer, candidates and employees remove unsuitable and poor quality candidates, from the recruitment process ensuring a consistently high quality of applications
Referral recruitment creates a lot of business impact like:
1. Produce higher ROI: it is discovered that the ROI for an employee referral program could be well over 500 percent if the performance differential could be quantified and included. Obtaining that level of ROI did not include branding value (employees talking positively to strangers about the firm and its products)
2. Reduce the burden on recruiting departments. It is not uncommon for managed referral programs to produce more than 50 percent of an organization’s total new hires. Because managed programs focus on tuning the program to produce only qualified applicants, a great deal of the labour that the recruiting department would usually expend screening and sorting applicants is eliminated.
3. Function successful across borders in global organizations. Few recruiting programs can function across global borders without tweaks to tune the program to the local environment. Employee referral programs are one of the shining exceptions.

It’s important to note that even though many referral programs produce very good to stunning results, but many referral programs are either stagnant or so poorly designed that they are an embarrassment to the referral program’s name. A few of the many reasons for those failures include:
1. Assigning management of the program as a part-time responsibility (a number of organizations have even assigned it to interns.)
2. No rewards or delayed rewards.
3. Marketing and PR collateral crafted from the companies’ perspective and rarely updated.
4. Slow response time and poor treatment of referrals and “referrers.”
5. Burdensome administrative rules and processes.
6. Lack of metrics (or only cost metrics) to enable and drive continuous improvement efforts.

It turns out that referral programs are a lot like marriages; when they work, they provide exceptional happiness and results for all involved, but once one party gets let down, they fast deteriorate to a shell of their potential.