By Gary Berney, Marketing Manager, HireUp
Astronomers may have photographed a black hole for the first time recently, but there’s been a black hole in talent acquisition for years!
The images of the black hole provided by the Event Horizon Telescope imaging project have been truly amazing. It’s brought discussions around all aspects of black holes to the forefront of people’s minds and it made me check back over recent employee and HR surveys to remind myself there’s a black hole a lot closer to home.
We spend our time implementing our referral app into client’s employees to drive significant increases in employee engagement and referral numbers. As part of the discovery process, we also survey candidates, employees and HR/TA depts to establish the existing situation.
Everyone knows that referrals are the most cost effective form of recruitment and retention for any organisation, yet we’ve seen that most employees disengage from the company referral programme due to a lack of communication.
This lack of communication always occurs around the employee referring in a candidate to the company. A never ending stream of employees from all industry sectors and sizes of companies talk about the “black hole” of sending a candidates information into the HR team only to never hear anymore from them. No ‘thank you for sending on a candidate’. No, update on how the candidate got on. Nothing. Yet recruiter.com found that 49% of employees do not participate in their company referral programme due to a lack of updates.
It’s amazing in this age of automation that some companies don’t take advantage of keeping their employees engaged to cultivate a culture of referrals which is, or should be, every company’s goal for their referral programme.
The results of doing so couldn’t be more stark. On average when using our app, 42% of our customers employees participate in their referral programmes due, in part, to the push notifications to candidates and employees alike. Most companies we’ve talked to have indicated the engagement levels in their old referral programmes would have been more around the mid teens as a percentage of total employees. This means you now have a bigger audience looking at any company vacancies and finding you the best talent. It also means your time to hire, cost of hire and speed to onboard are all enhanced.
With so many competing challenges in talent acquisition, keeping employees and candidates up to date is one of those jobs that falls down the list, but it doesn’t have to be the hard work it once was. There are tools out there to make your referral programme engaging and informative.
So avoid the black hole of communication that has hampered so many referral programmes. By doing so, you will benefit from the incredible results on engagement levels and referral numbers which ultimately improves all other parts of acquisition and retention.
Get your free customised demo of our employee referral solution by using the link: https://hireuponline.com/#employee-referrals-demo.
Gary Berney is the Marketing Manager for HireUp, an award winning referral app.
