How to Gather and Manage Employee Referrals

Why Should I Gather Referrals?

Thanks to referrals, you will be able to recruit quickly and cost-effectively.

Employee referrals are a great way to find qualified candidates fast. Your employees wouldn’t refer to someone who doesn’t know anything about the field or someone who wouldn’t do their job well. The referring employee’s reputation is also on the line if they refer to someone really bad.

Thanks to referrals, you will be able to recruit quickly and cost-effectively because you will save the trouble of creating a position, publishing, and promoting it, and screening candidates. That should be enough reason for any company to actively collect employee referrals.

If you’re not convinced yet, then how about this: studies show that both the referred employees and the employees who gave the referral are motivated to stay at their jobs longer than traditional hires. Referrals are not only a good way to hire but also a great way to engage your current personnel.

How Can I Gather and Manage Referrals?

In small businesses, referrals are often quite easy to gather and manage. All it takes is a few coffee breaks with your colleagues, asking if they know someone who might be a good fit for your company. If you are lucky, you will already have a few good referrals—or at least employees who agree to keep an eye out and report back to you.

Managing the referrals is easy, too, when there are only one or two people in charge of the task.

In bigger companies, however, the task becomes more complicated. Having the right tools to support your mission is key. If your ATS (application tracking system) supports building talent pools, then you are in luck. With TalentAdore, you have an easy way to gather referrals into your Talent Community.

All it takes from you is figuring out what kind of talent pools you want to build and then generate and share an invitation link to gather referrals in those pools. You can have separate pools for salespersons, marketing professionals, and software developers, for example.

There are no hidden lists of good referrals in your colleagues’ desk drawers or local machines that tend to be forgotten.

As the referrals start to come in, you can first confirm them as qualified and see who gave the referral. Then you can contact the talent and invite them to an active recruitment process or continue the dialogue via email. If your company encourages referrals with referral bonuses, then it is easy to keep track of that, as well.

Managing the referral process is straightforward; you can grant talent pool access to everyone involved in the process and ensure transparency. There are no hidden lists of good referrals in your colleagues’ desk drawers or local machines that tend to be forgotten.

With the help of TalentAdore’s Talent Community, you can contact referred talent and keep them warm. You don’t need to worry about any GDPR issues when you collect the employee referrals in your Talent Community.

Why Should I Work on Gathering Referrals Now?

The COVID-19 pandemic is still affecting our daily lives, and many companies are slowing down their recruitment processes—some are even putting them on hold altogether. Even though active processes are on hold, companies should not stop building their networks of potential talent. Instead, they should be more active than ever.

After the pandemic is over, and your company is recruiting at full speed again, wouldn’t it be great if you could just tap into your company’s talent pool and find potential talent for open positions right there? I think so. That’s why I believe investing time and effort into gathering referrals is very important right now. It could help your company stand out in these difficult times.

How to gather employee referrals is just one of the biggest challenges of recruitment. What are the rest and how can you solve them?

Read or download our comprehensive guide.