By Gary Berney, Marketing Manager, HireUp
Let’s face it, recruiting people for your business is a risky process and often a costly one if the candidates you selected for interview aren’t successful or worse still the successful candidate leaves after a few months.
Even if everything about a candidate looks right, you can still get it wrong. We’ve all had them. The person whose CV stands out from the pack and then they do well at interview and so offering them the role represents recruitment success. Or does it? Yes you got them onboard but find out 6 months later that they’ve not worked out or they’ve left the company of their own accord. Either way, that feeling of success you felt as a recruiter soon disappears.
If you have time, you conduct an exit interview to establish what went wrong, why were they not a good fit for the business? What aspects made them quit etc. You can’t completely take the risk out of recruiting but you can ensure you give yourself the best chance of successfully hiring the right person, first time. Agencies, if they’re attuned to your needs, will help you narrow down the field for you, while Job boards and LinkedIn will provide you with volume but not necessarily quality. This is why employee referrals are such an important part of any recruitment strategy.
We know from our customers feedback, that the quality of candidates received via referral are invariably the best. You can then chat to the employee referring to get a better understanding of what skills prompted them to refer the candidate, how long they’ve known them, what their short- comings might be etc. In other words you get the inside track on what the person is really like rather than the glossy CV version. This speeds up your background checks. When coming to interview you’ll also know the candidate has received the positives and negatives of working at your company from his friend, the employee, and so comes to interview with the right level of expectation and understanding of the company, making them a far better fit.
This process has typically meant a quicker time to hire than through all other methods of recruitment. We’re currently seeing an average of 10 days faster time to hire among our customers. Add this to the fact that a referral candidate on-boards quicker and becomes revenue productive quicker too. It all means that the return on investment through referrals is far greater than through other forms of recruitment.
Finally, referred candidates stay up to 20% longer than through traditional recruitment and the employee referring will also stay longer, so you’re extending your retention rates leading to less hiring requirements in the future.
Do some referrals not work out? Of course, but it’s about reducing risk, you’ll never be able to eliminate it. You’re looking to make the best hires you possibly can to benefit the business and referral sits at the top of the best ways to recruit. It’s time to look at minimizing recruitment risks.
Not getting 30+% of your hires via employee referral? Then you need to speak to us here at HireUp. We help drive employee engagement, referral numbers, retention and recruitment cost reductions.
Visit our website: https://hireuponline.com for more information.
