Candidate referrals are very important when building a solid candidate pipeline.
A candidate pipeline is a pool of qualified people interested in learning about job opportunities as they become available at your company. You “pipeline” candidates because their skills, experience, and traits match a particular role for which there is no immediate hiring need.
We know how important it is to find the right candidate as fast as possible. And we know that sometimes you find good talent that isn’t suitable for the current open role, but you want to keep them close.
Having this in mind, we’ve built systems that will help you strengthen your pipeline and keep potential future employees engaged and interested in your company. So how do we do it?
Keep All Candidates in One Place
70% of the global workforce comprises passive talent who aren’t actively job searching, and the remaining 30% are active job seekers. Scary, isn’t it? The good news is that most (up to 90%) of these passive candidates are interested in hearing about new job opportunities, as reported by LinkedIn.
You can keep all the candidates who interacted with your company in one place and you can keep them engaged through newsletters, messages, challenges or even upskilling courses.
81% of candidates say the main thing that would improve the candidate experience is regular updates (CareerBuilder). And on the other hand, recruiters are spending too much time on operational tasks and don’t have time to keep the candidates informed. All of these can be done easily through a human-centric approach.
Highlight the candidates with potential
99.8% of the screened candidates are not being hired. You invest time in screening, first interviews and different recruitment stages; in the end, you hire 0,2% of the candidates you interacted with within the last 6 months.
Through Jobful, you can create different pipelines and add the candidates in various categories. If you see a profile that it’s ok but it’s not suitable for the current open role, you can add it to the proper pipeline and access that profile when you will have a proper role opened. But it’s essential to keep them informed about the recruitment process – and to make sure that your employees are speading the word, as candidate referrals are a powerful tool.
Invest in candidates’ development
The talent shortage is the no. 1 hiring challenge today. A study by the National Federation of Independent Business has found that 87% of HR professionals reported “few or no qualified applicants” for the positions they were trying to fill. And it won’t go away.
You can get involved in upskilling candidates, offering them access to company learning materials and courses. This way, you keep the candidates with potential close to your company and help them be more prepared for future opportunities.
The next time you are looking for a candidate with a specific skill – you can go directly to Courses Graduates and choose the ones who have the best results.
Building active candidate pipelines is the future of recruitment, saving you time and money. Through our technology, you have access to multiple engagement mechanisms and ways to increase your candidate database.
Crowdsource Talent Through Candidate Referrals
Employee and candidate referrals have the highest applicant to hire conversion rate. 67% of recruiters said the recruiting process was shorter, and 51% said it was less expensive to recruit via referrals (Jobvite). Through our technology, you can receive referrals from your current employees and candidates, increasing your pool of candidates even faster.
Great professionals are usually surrounded by other great professionals – this is the tested assumption at the base of Candidate Referral programs. According to Jobvite, 40% of hirings come from employee and canddiate referrals which count for only 7% of candidates. There is no news that this is a game changer and a mechanism that would solve many problems in sourcing candidates.
We took this assumption one step further and thought that great professionals looking for a change in their careers are also surrounded by professionals curious about new opportunities. And since changing jobs is often a stressful event in one’s professional life, sharing the journey with friends comes almost naturally.
Indeed the Harvard Business Review has shown that if you give good service and then immediately take the opportunity of asking for a referral, more than 50% of people will recommend you to other prospects. A very impressive figure compared to the 5% of referrals it is estimated you receive when you give good service but do not ask for a referral.
How to set up a candidate referral system:
Choose Who You Are Asking for Candidate Referrals
You don’t want to trigger unwanted competition between your candidates, therefore you should ask for referrals from the candidates you are not moving forward with. Now it is up to you if you want to apply this system to candidates who rejected your invitation or to the candidates that won’t go past your interviews. Keep in mind that you should always ask for referrals also to other jobs than the one the candidate applied for. We recommend giving them between 3-5 jobs from the same domain or connected domains to recommend for since it will increase your chances of a successful referral.
Set Up An Automated System
Since we are fans of automations, we suggest you find an automatic way of asking for referrals – an automated email or a form, a specific page in your career site or any other easy solution you can find. This will increase the chances of usage and also will make sure you don’t add any more unnecessary effort to your process. On Jobful, we implemented an automatic referral page for candidates so that you can send them there at any step of the way.
Offer An Incentive
Offer candidates an incentive to refer their friends or colleagues. For example, the cost of an iPod Shuffle ($149) as an incentive is a small price for a recruitment agency to pay for a candidate who may result in a $7,500 placement fee. Likewise for corporate employers, an $149 iPod pales in comparison to job advertising costs that can often balloon out into four figure sums.
On Jobful, you can incentivize candidates with special items from our Shop including books, mentoring hours, different types of merch or even tickets to cool events that will also boost your employer brand.
Follow Up Candidate Referrals & Measure Results
In order to decide if this method works for your targeted candidates or roles make sure to always follow up on referrals immediately and measure the progress of those candidates. In order to make an informed decision on this topic we recommend you to take into account the cost of the incentives, the average response time of the candidate, an average of how far in the process these candidates reach and the conversion to hire.
By building this system with a human centric design through accessibility and incentives that appeal to the targeted candidates, you will most probably build a candidate generator model of referral that can fuel your recruitment projects continuously. Since Jobful is a human centric designed platform that works with human motivators in order to build a better experience for all actors of the recruitment process, we strongly advise you start experimenting with this candidate attraction model.
Curious how you can improve your recruitment through Jobful? Find more here.
