Employee referral programs are the most powerful tool in recruiting, routinely producing the highest quality and volume of experienced hires.
Yet for some unexplained reason, most corporate college-hire programs don’t have a referral component.
A few firms have pioneered in the college referral area. For example, the always leading-edge talent team at Intuit has produced amazing results with micro-cash bonuses (over 50% of their hires from one university came from their student referral program).
And Endeca found that Harvard and MIT students were willing to make amazing referrals with the promise of a flat-screen TV as a reward. Bold, but effective!
Not having a referral program as a key element of your college recruiting effort is a missed opportunity because no group of potential candidates are more connected with their peers than college students.
And the stronger the connections, the better referral programs work. Students connect through social networking sites, text messaging, online forums, face-to-face in classrooms, at social events, and in student organizations. If you understand their social connections, it’s relatively easy to develop a formal “college hire referral program” that can supplement your career-center efforts and produce a majority of your intern and college graduate hires.
Think about it, you can have others do more than “half of the work” in college recruiting (by making referrals), which frees up time and resources to focus on the other half.
The Referral Concept
The basic premise of all employee referral programs is that “the very best” know other top individuals. They get to know them because top performers learn from and compare themselves to other top performers. Professionals are constantly talking to each other on the phone, through text messaging, and Internet forums.
Shifting the focus to students, it’s clear that the best students know other top students because they identify them and compete against them in classes. They also meet each other in social situations, in student groups and clubs, in honor societies, and of course, online.
All referral programs work by getting others to share with your recruiters the names of the top individuals that they know. By merely asking or by offering a small incentive, they will likely share these names.
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