Archive for category: Hiring

Using An Employee Referral Program Effectively

In this guide, we’ll break down 11 steps to build a killer employee referral program to help you attract top talent. Read on!

Businesses will do everything in their power to attract competent professionals and use every trick in the book to strengthen their talent pool. Traditionally, HR solely assumed responsibility for this function, but as new technologies, mindsets, and practices (such as crowdsourcing and user-generated content) recast the workplace, more unique and more responsive methods for recruiting talent emerge.

In recent years, Employee Referral Programs (ERP) have become a competitive advantage in the talent-sourcing market. According to reports, it has surpassed conventional talent acquisition and recruitment practices as the top method for finding and hiring new employees.

What is an Employee Referral Program?

An employee referral program is an in-house system for finding, qualifying, and hiring candidates for vacant roles and functions in the company. ERPs incentivize employees to submit personal referrals from their social and professional networks who may qualify for open positions in the company. Incentives and rewards may include monetary bonuses and non-monetary prizes such as vacations and concert tickets.

Benefits of Employee Referral Programs

Numerous studies have already established the case for ERPs. Here are some of the most persuasive arguments for its adoption:

• Employee referral programs significantly reduce recruitment costs, with a study finding that businesses can save $3000 or more per hire using referrals.
• ERPs improve candidate quality, culture fit, and retention rate.
• Candidates sourced via an employee referral program get hired much faster than candidates sourced through traditional channels.
• Candidates sourced via ERP make it to onboarding stage (3 to 4 times) more compared to candidates sourced via traditional methods
• ERP-sourced candidates deliver the highest ROI compared to other methods.

And here are some figures from LinkedIn:

• Employee referrals rank as the number 1 method for people to discover a new job.
• Companies can expand their talent pool by as much as ten times if they leverage their employees’ social and professional networks via an effective referral program.
• While rewards motivate employees to submit referrals, 35% do so primarily to help friends, 32% to help their organization, and 26% to be recognized as a valuable colleague. Only 6% submit referrals for the rewards.
• Candidates are 46% more likely to accept your messages when these messages are associated or tagged with employees they personally know.
• Along with online job boards and social media, employee referral programs are among the top source of high-quality talent.

11 Steps To Turbo-Charge Your Employee Referral Program

1) Set clear objectives.

Only embark on a journey with a clear destination in mind. Ideal employee referral programs go beyond getting as many candidates as possible in your talent pool. While across-the-board recruitment is obviously the overarching goal of ERPs, you can still fine-tune the program for specific campaign-based objectives such as improving workforce diversity, populating a freshly minted customer success unit, or expediting the search for a crucial software developer position specializing in a particular programming language or development framework.

Once specific objectives have been set for time-bound referral campaigns, get the entire organization in the loop. Communicate the goals, explain the need, and mention the rewards. Again, transparency, immediacy, and relevance will help drive and sustain employee involvement.

2) Make everything simple and easy.

Even when employees want to participate in your ERP, engagement and results will ultimately depend on how simple and effective your referral process is. Conversely, tedious, convoluted, and inconsistent ERP processes may generate buzz at the onset but tend to fizzle out much sooner than everyone expected.

Never complicate the process. Don’t require employees and referred candidates to exert more effort than is necessary. Remember, your people have primary functions they need to focus on. An ERP solution that requires too much time and effort will keep them from delivering high performance in the roles they were hired for in the first place. So make it ridiculously easy to attract, submit, monitor, evaluate, and conclude referrals.

One way is to adopt ERP and applicant tracking solutions (ATS) that are intuitive, easily accessible, and engaging. Go for mobile-ready packages that are integrable to networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Embrace solutions that virtually anyone in the company can access anytime and enjoy using.

3) Let everyone know.

You might have the best ERP, but nothing happens if no one knows about it. Communication is the glue that keeps effective referral programs together. ERP awareness and involvement should pervade the organization from top to bottom and from the ground up. Make it everyone’s business to find and attract talent because it is the only resource to make things happen.

Advertise your referral program and bang the gong each time you launch specific referral campaigns. (Some companies even go beyond the organization to include customers, suppliers, and vendors in their incentives program). Information about vacancies, job requirements, role qualifications, corporate culture, benefits, candidate status, incentives for efforts, and successful referral rewards should be easily accessible.

Establish a communication, feedback, and tracking system that keeps all stakeholders in the loop and enables them to advance referrals from start to finish easily. Form a team or assign a coordinator to ensure ERP communications are clear, complete, and pervasive.

4) Use technology.

In virtually every aspect of business, technology serves as the ultimate enabler. However, the way technology is used can also make a big difference. The baseline is to have a centralized ERP platform that makes it extremely easy for employees to submit referrals, for HR to evaluate candidates, for referred candidates to track their status, and for everyone in the loop to communicate.

Some applicant tracking systems (ATS) have native ERP functionalities, while others allow for equivalent plugins or extensions. Determine what is best for your organization. In the new economy, relying on mere emails or spreadsheets to manage referrals and talent acquisition will no longer make the cut.

5) Train your people.

The processes and technologies that comprise your employee referral program may be intuitive. However, it would be best if you still educated everyone about more innovative ways to use the system and the rationale and rewards behind the program.

Articulate the program’s overall goal of attracting competent — if not top-notch — professionals to the company. Establish quality benchmarks. Because candidate screening takes time, dissuade employees from referring known shenanigans at the onset.

Walk everyone through the process from start to finish, so they know what to expect regarding feedback frequency, documentary requirements, and screening parameters. Finally, clarify how incentives and rewards will be implemented.

6) Speed up the process.

Few things are more frustrating than having to wait longer than you should. Employees who were initially excited to a) help friends get onboard, b) help the company solve its talent shortage, or c) help themselves to the ERP’s excellent incentives will eventually lose steam when left to keep wondering whatever happened to their referrals.

Establish a reasonable timeline for processing employee referrals. Always send timely feedback each time a milestone has been reached. Respond to employee or candidate queries and clarifications within 24 hours.

Consider screening and interviewing candidates within one week before giving a job offer or terminating their candidacy for the specific role they were referred to. One way to do this is to provide remote interview and assessment options.

7) Provide an excellent candidate experience.

Make your brand as an employer stand out. Start by giving job applicants a smooth, flexible, responsive, and stress-free experience. This way, candidates who don’t get on board will still remember the good experience and share it with their friends. Remember, online reputation matters.

8) Recognize efforts, and reward results.

Without motivation, people will hardly move. Sure, helping friends land a job or being loyal to a good company may incentivize employees to submit referrals, but that won’t be enough to sustain an ambitious talent acquisition strategy. People exert effort because they expect something out of it.

That being said, rewards entail costs, and a good employee referral program should have a well-thought-out budget and reward strategy. The key is to have compelling but sustainable rewards for good results and adequate incentives for keeping employees involved in the ERP.

Having creative, unique, or original rewards will go a long way. In addition to monetary prizes, you should also consider vacations, gadgets, free enrollment to a popular certifications program, and tickets to concerts, sporting events, or health spas. Acknowledge and incentivize active ERP participants even when their referrals are not hired. You can, for example, use a point-based gamification system that entitles active ERP participants to free breaks and treats at the nearest cafe.

Bottomline: make your rewards and incentives system so fun, compelling, and sustainable that employees will enjoy being involved in ERP for the long haul.

9) Try every method. Explore all channels.

There are countless ways to implement an employee referral program. However, you’ll limit your talent acquisition potential if you keep yourself from trying more than a few. Worse, you may not discover what works perfectly for your organization if you adopt the same methods repeatedly.

Some of the techniques used by smart talent acquisition teams include the following —

• Gamification of incentives to sustain employee engagement
• Linking ERP with performance assessments
• Referral sprints (extremely short but focused campaigns to create a shortlist of candidates)
• Quarterly referral contests (most referrals, most successful hires, funniest candidates, etc.) between groups, teams, or departments with significant rewards to the ultimate winner
• Head-turning rewards such as cars, home entertainment systems, and exotic travel packages to be awarded during special company events.

10) Make onboarding memorable.

Greet new hires via the referral program with a warm welcome. This extends their great experience during the recruiting process and reinforces the impression that your company truly values its talent. Provide relevant training and responsive coaching that will prepare new hires for the specific challenges associated with their functions and immerse them in the corporate culture.

Make a case for your brand throughout the employee journey. Make new hires feel at home and happy about joining your company so they’ll gladly participate in the referral program immediately.

11) Assess program performance. Improve. Repeat.

A functioning employee referral program that reels decent talent from the job market is terrific. But that is not enough. You always have to think long-term and consider emerging changes in the workplace. That entails making a self-assessment on whether the ERP is as successful as it can possibly be.

Establish your criteria for success. These could be metrics such as —

• Employee Engagement (percentage of employees participating in the ERP)
• Share of Referrals to the Number of Total Hires per Period
• Percentage of Good Referrals to Total Number of Referrals
• Performance of Employees Hired via ERP

Use other data-driven metrics to measure the success of your ERP implementation. When results do not meet your expectations, adopt other techniques, approaches, and technologies that may improve performance.

Reboot. Repeat.

Conclusion

Whether you are just starting to build an employee referral program or have been running one for a while, getting the results you expect don’t happen automatically. You may use the best HR technologies on the market but cannot automate success.

Talent is about humans, and recruiting talent into your company takes a team of motivated humans on the other side of the equation. By making your company a stakeholder in talent acquisition, you give everyone a proactive role in your company’s success.

Valuing people is the first step in strengthening an employer’s brand. If your brand sticks, your employees will more than gladly submit candidate referrals to a company they are proud of.

Need help getting started? Contact the team at Rainmakers to help with your recruiting efforts!

Avoiding Costly Mistakes

The cost of hiring the wrong sales candidate can be excruciating. In this article, we’ll explain how to avoid that.

A full roster is a standard to aim for, but that doesn’t guarantee you’re getting an optimal salesforce. New sales hires can either make or break your team’s performance. Good hires certainly will help you sustain growth and even improve overall performance down the road, but onboarding bad candidates can cause problems much worse than a simple headache.

In any business organization, recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training job candidates entails substantial costs of time, money, and effort. A recent CareerBuilder survey estimates that the average price of one bad hire in the U.S. is $15,000. That barely includes severe business impacts such as reduced productivity, lost time to hire and train more deserving candidates, tarnished output quality (your brand!), and spikes in customer attrition rate.

Bad hires — especially those with harmful emotional baggage — can also cause team morale to plummet and significantly undercut the team’s ability to maintain standards, comply with timelines, and achieve goals. Finally, bad hires rarely stay put, forcing you to go through the recruitment cycle again (sigh) and spend even more precious resources in the process.

In the case of a sales organization, hiring bad candidates directly impacts revenues and your bottom line. Indeed, you wouldn’t want anything to mess up those figures. But, unfortunately, bad sales hires come and go more often than expected. That’s because of several factors inherent in sales recruitment:

1. Most people think sales are straightforward. However, desperate job seekers would try their luck applying for a sales opening even if they prefer another role.
2. Selling is not for everyone. A successful sales career requires unique skills, experience, personality, and mindset combinations.
3. Sales-related certifications exist, but these are rare and are seldom industry-mandated or required as qualifications in job ads.

Given this scenario, sales recruiters need the right tools and awareness that will help them prevent mediocre candidates from ever getting a foothold. Detecting red flags well before handing out a job offer is an excellent place to start.

To help you do that, here are some of the most common telltale signs of a wrong sales candidate:

1) Low interest, enthusiasm, or motivation.

An applicant who doesn’t demonstrate enthusiasm about the role she is aiming for may show the same disinterest when making pitches on the sales floor. Of course, it is possible that your initial impression is inaccurate or that the applicant is only momentarily unmotivated. Still, even minor optics and small lapses can become real disadvantages later. As a sales recruiter, you’ll always want (visibly and genuinely) passionate, driven professionals on board.

2) Hates doing homework.

Did the candidate research your company, services, and critical movers before sending his application or attending an interview? If not, ignore the fool. If a candidate chooses not to spend time preparing, he is not worth your time. After all, selling success primarily depends on how prepared you are when engaging prospects. Only sales professionals willing to do their homework can dare hope to achieve targets.

3) Lacks basic sales competency.

Selling techniques and advanced methodologies can be learned. But don’t settle for candidates who lack even the rudimentary skill to sell themselves — especially when better candidates are around. For example, if a candidate can’t formulate a decent elevator speech to get noticed, hiring one will short-change your team.

Moreover, avoid candidates who can’t seem to listen and those who ask senseless questions. Conversely, block anyone who doesn’t ask any questions at all. Selling is a conversation; active listening and asking the right questions are essential to successful customer engagement.

4) Unprofessional behavior.

Excessive spelling/grammatical errors, sharing sensitive information about former employers, immature mannerisms, disturbing posts on social media, coarse/impolite language, and dressing way off the norm are some signs of unprofessional behavior. You’re not running a police state and have a reasonable tolerance for deviant behavior, but there’s a limit to what a competent sales organization can take. Sales is methodical and adheres to norms and best practices, primarily in B2B. Going well beyond acceptable thresholds will cause an unwanted impact on your brand or performance.

5) Bad punctuality and time management.

Managing time and respecting other people’s schedules may seem so old school, but punctuality remains high on the list of critical selling skills. You will always want sales professionals who meet timelines and rarely need to cram at the very last leg of the quarter to meet quotas.

Showing up late during client engagements shows that you lack motivation and respect for other people’s time. Few customers will be willing to wait for perennially delayed demos when a rival vendor can deliver the goods immediately. After all, the digital economy unfolds in an age of instant gratification.

6) Excessive job hopping.

Frequently switching roles or employers shows candidates struggle to follow a coherent, focused career track. Think twice before investing time and money to hire and train this type of applicant. The costs of hiring and losing workers are becoming prohibitive in highly competitive markets like B2B tech sales. In addition, frequent job hopping may also be a sign of personality flaws in the candidate that you wouldn’t want to deal with as a sales leader.

7) Underperforming career track.

On the other hand, you also need to flag candidates who have more or less held the same role and pay grade in the same company for many years. Something is wrong if a professional struggles to get a promotion for a long time and still chooses to stay. You would want highly driven sales professionals who care about their career advancement and possess reasonable ambition.

8) Lies during the interview.

Perform due diligence if a sales candidate’s online profile or submitted resume seems too good to be true. Of course, you want excellent and highly motivated sellers on your team, but you want the real deal, not counterfeit con artists. Understandably, people would like to show you their best foot forward, but excessive self-promotion to misleading and lying to recruiters is a glaring red flag.

Validate claimed certifications, degrees, and sales achievements, especially when dollar signs and other verifiable metrics accompany these. Lying about relevant experiences, even in minor aspects such as the number of months an applicant worked in a particular company, is a big deal for companies with high ethical standards. Remember, trust is the most valuable currency in sales.

9) High levels of negativity and vibes of disgruntlement.

Happy, well-balanced, and passionate people are what you need for your salesforce. Your door should be locked for candidates who demonstrate toxic levels of negativity and emotional baggage even at the onset. Applicants who regularly bad-mouth former employers and co-workers shouldn’t find a way to join your team. Candidates who think they are always the best, show excessive aggression, and take credit even for achievements for which they have minimal contributions should be shown the nearest exit. Finally, chronic complainers and whiners won’t thrive in sales — a world where getting rejected multiple times is just part of the daily grind.

10) Lack of legitimate references.

You want candidates who are proud of their professional or academic achievements and who can readily have someone authorized to verify their credentials. Sometimes, the standard practice is to provide character or professional references only upon a recruiter’s request. That is understandable, but what amounts to a red flag is when the only connection submitted is the candidate’s cousin. Always prefer candidates whose applications are backed by solid and relevant references, especially when you know or can readily reach out to these persons.

Avoid Making Bad Sales Hires… Once And For All

Having incompetent or unmotivated sellers in your team wastes valuable resources and negatively impacts morale and performance. Of course, the ideal scenario is to have a reliable system that prevents sub-par applicants from ever getting on board. However, the preceding red flags should at least alert you of common types of unwanted candidates.

Here are some final tips to remember/implement:

1. Don’t be desperate. Don’t settle for candidates you feel will cause headaches later on.
2. Create and adopt an Ideal Candidate Profile for each role in your sales team.
3. Do your homework. Perform background checks. Go beyond online profiles and resumes and snoop around to verify what candidates claim in their applications.
4. Conduct preliminary phone interviews to spare yourself the agony of actual, in-person interviews with behaviorally flawed or unprofessional candidates.
5. Partner with specialist recruiters or reliable talent scouts in your particular field.

Ready to find top candidates for your organization? Let Rainmakers help! Contact us to get started!