Talent remains the biggest concern area for organizations today as talent crunch forces organizations to curtail or put their expansion plans on hold.
Especially in industries where people provide the real competitive edge to organizations, it becomes doubly important for organizations to put in place a robust talent pipeline.
This is easier said than done as it is a struggle to source people who can match the requirements of the job or can fit into the culture of the organization.
In fact a survey conducted by Towers Watson concluded that despite high rates of unemployment in the US, 54% of the participating organizations reported difficulties in attracting skilled employees and an astounding 74% faced problems hiring top of the line talent.
Some or most of these recruitment problems can be significantly reduced by implementing an effective employee referral program that becomes a part of the culture of the organization.
No one knows the organization and the job better than your current employees and making them partners in the recruiting process serves as a win-win situation for both parties.
Let us look at some of the biggest advantages that organizations can reap from a well-executed employee referral program.
• Vodafone discovered that a sharp focus on referral program and the employer brand building as part of their recruitment strategy reduced their average recruiting cycle by almost 2/3rds, dramatically improving both the top line and bottom line of the business through faster filling of positions at significantly reduced costs.
In fact the biggest benefit of a well running referral program is that since candidates are referred by employees with knowledge of the culture and job role, they are in a sense pre screened for eligibility and are able to move through the recruitment process much faster than regular non prescreened applicants.
• Almost all recruiting initiatives operate on a regional or at best country level since hiring is mostly done locally, employee referral programs being the only exception.
In fact organizations like Agilent have implemented a universal referral program across geographies in Asia, America and Europe and are reaping the benefits of access to a global pool of high quality talent, a highly adaptable workforce able to work across cultures and a much higher offer to acceptance rate.
• Organizations like Tenet Healthcare and Allstate have started focused their recruiting efforts primarily on referrals as they have found that candidates hired through employee referrals proved to be much more productive than other non-referral hires.
Not only were they able to reduce the training and assimilation time to become productive much faster, they tended to remain among the top performers of the organization throughout their tenure.
Referred candidates also tended to be more satisfied on the job and had higher retention rates, staying with the organization much longer than non-referred candidates.
These are just the more obvious and documented advantages of including an employee referral program within your recruitment strategy.
A host of other benefits like building high performance teams through employee referrals where top performers refer other top performers they would like to work with as well as the reduced burden on recruiting team as employees become partners in the sourcing process are some of the other lesser known benefits.
Especially in industries where people provide the real competitive edge to organizations, it becomes doubly important for organizations to put in place a robust talent pipeline.
This is easier said than done as it is a struggle to source people who can match the requirements of the job or can fit into the culture of the organization.
In fact a survey conducted by Towers Watson concluded that despite high rates of unemployment in the US, 54% of the participating organizations reported difficulties in attracting skilled employees and an astounding 74% faced problems hiring top of the line talent.
Some or most of these recruitment problems can be significantly reduced by implementing an effective employee referral program that becomes a part of the culture of the organization.
No one knows the organization and the job better than your current employees and making them partners in the recruiting process serves as a win-win situation for both parties.
Let us look at some of the biggest advantages that organizations can reap from a well-executed employee referral program.
• Vodafone discovered that a sharp focus on referral program and the employer brand building as part of their recruitment strategy reduced their average recruiting cycle by almost 2/3rds, dramatically improving both the top line and bottom line of the business through faster filling of positions at significantly reduced costs.
In fact the biggest benefit of a well running referral program is that since candidates are referred by employees with knowledge of the culture and job role, they are in a sense pre screened for eligibility and are able to move through the recruitment process much faster than regular non prescreened applicants.
• Almost all recruiting initiatives operate on a regional or at best country level since hiring is mostly done locally, employee referral programs being the only exception.
In fact organizations like Agilent have implemented a universal referral program across geographies in Asia, America and Europe and are reaping the benefits of access to a global pool of high quality talent, a highly adaptable workforce able to work across cultures and a much higher offer to acceptance rate.
• Organizations like Tenet Healthcare and Allstate have started focused their recruiting efforts primarily on referrals as they have found that candidates hired through employee referrals proved to be much more productive than other non-referral hires.
Not only were they able to reduce the training and assimilation time to become productive much faster, they tended to remain among the top performers of the organization throughout their tenure.
Referred candidates also tended to be more satisfied on the job and had higher retention rates, staying with the organization much longer than non-referred candidates.
These are just the more obvious and documented advantages of including an employee referral program within your recruitment strategy.
A host of other benefits like building high performance teams through employee referrals where top performers refer other top performers they would like to work with as well as the reduced burden on recruiting team as employees become partners in the sourcing process are some of the other lesser known benefits.
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