Integrating Social Media into your Employee Referral Process

 Recruitment professionals have long been interested in the best ways to recruit potential employees. This interest stems from two main ideas. The first idea is that certain recruitment methods will yield higher numbers of acceptable applicants, thus making the recruitment process less expensive.

For example, if a $200 newspaper advertisement results in 50 applicants for a job compared to two applicants resulting from a $4,000 fee paid to an employment agency, then an organization might be better off recruiting through newspaper ads.

The second idea is that certain recruitment methods will attract applicants who, once on the job, perform better than employees recruited by other methods. That is, even though newspaper ads in the previous example yielded more applicants, it is possible that none of the 50 will perform as well or stay with the organization as long as would the two from the employment agency.

Thus, the savings obtained in recruitment costs would be nullified by the increased training expenses and the reduction in employee performance.

Though several studies have reported that certain recruitment methods yield better applicants than do others, my 13-year career in building strategic HR practices and leading HR initiatives suggests that employees hired through employee referrals have a longer tenure than do employees recruited through other means. However, this also indicates that recruitment methods appear to be equal in regard to employee performance.

Even though employee referrals are superior only when tenure is used as the criterion, several theories have been postulated about why referrals result in better employees. The first of these theories suggests that applicants who are referred by other employees receive more accurate information about the job than do employees recruited by other methods. In essence, the applicant receives a realistic job preview from a current employee.

The success of an employee referral program has its roots in the interpersonal attraction theory that indicates that people tend to be friends with others who are similar to themselves. If this is true, and the research strongly suggests that it is, then an employee recommending a friend for a job will more than likely recommend a friend similar to him/herself. Thus, it would make sense that a person who is happy with his/her job would recommend a person who, due to his/her similarity to the incumbent, should also be happy with the job.

Thus the fact that employee referrals are clearly a very effective method for sourcing candidates is established. Given the varied benefits of an Employee Referral Program in any organization, there is no doubt about the very fact that it works well in the recruitment strategy. But there needs to be a strategy where a recruiter can make his employee referral program work better, be more effective, efficient and thereby gain maximum benefit from it. This plan needs to be chalked out taking into account the entire organization’s hiring needs. Organizations should be able to tap a wide network of people in shortest time, which would be one of the indicators that the employee referral program is working to its optimum capacity.

So just imagine the pool of talent that an organization can tap into just by integrating its employee referral solution program with the social media platform.

In fact, citing a personal example , we at Zycus recently subscribed to a new social media integrated employee referral tool called ZALP, and it has effortlessly helped to not only boost employee participation in our referral program but has also worked to streamline and automate the entire process.

In order to exploit the effectiveness of such social employee referral tools and technology, many organizations have started to adapt to this change and are encouraging employees to refer good connections from their personal social networks.

Statistics state that 72 percent of the firms have made use of social media recruitment techniques and are more than satisfied with the results. The day is not far when social media will play a pivotal role in every recruitment strategy of every organization and employee referrals integrated with social media will be a must have.

Whether this sudden surge in having a social media integrated recruitment process is just a fad or a change that is here to stay is something we need to wait and watch to determine.