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Employee referrals: your team can help you grow

Employee referrals: your team can help you grow
HireHive Team

HireHive Team

HireHive

What is an employee referral scheme?

An employee referral scheme encourages a company's existing employees to help select and recruit suitable candidates from their own social networks.

Why should you use employee referrals to grow your team?

We believe that great people know other great people and the best way to utilise this is to implement employee referrals. Referred employees have higher retention rates and increased employee engagement in their company.

On average each employee has about 200 first degree connections on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. If your company has 300 employees then you theoretically have access to 60,000 people.

How to make employee referrals work for you

Communication is key. It is important to engage with referred candidates as soon as possible – your employees have placed a lot of trust in your company by referring a friend so you should treat them well.

Open up your referral scheme to as many people as possible. This can only increase your chances of attracting great talent.

Give the right rewards - Quite often employees respond better to rewards other than financial compensation. Putting the human element back into recognition goes farther in encouraging employee engagement. It's not always about the money.

Putting the human element back into recognition goes farther in encouraging employee engagement.

Highlight the importance of great talent to your employees and clearly communicate how that affects them. Job security and improved company performance are two important motivators.

Recognise a good referral. This can be done in so many ways, social sites, personalised thank you's, a special lunch or via the company site/internal site.

Reward all good quality candidates, not just the ones that are hired. Reward an employee if their referral gets to interview stage.

Version1 hired 15 people in 1 month through social referrals

Version1 is one of the fastest growing IT services companies in Western Europe. With every new job announcement comes the pressure to find great people to fill these roles. Version1 looked at the option of implementing a social referrals campaign with HireHive in order to reach out to the networks of their 300 strong workforce.

“We saw social referral as a game-changer in recruitment,” says Jarlath Dooley, HR Director. “Firstly, there are huge cost savings as we do not require a recruitment agency, but, more importantly referrals are undoubtedly better hires. Great people know other great people.”

version1

100 referred candidates came through in the first week of the campaign and the momentum has continued. Following the successful hire of 15 people from the first referrals campaign Version1 have more than 20 referral campaigns running at any one time.

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Hilary Dempsey Head of HR at Life Credit union

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