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Most corporate recruiting functions inexplicably restrict the effectiveness of their employee referral program by limiting senior management participation.

Instead, recruiting directors should design a unique “executive referral program” that encourages executives to make referrals for your high-level openings.

You might think a separate program is unnecessary because high-quality referrals should flow naturally from your executives as part of their job, but such an assumption would be a mistake. Instead, make every executive an “executive talent scout” by developing a specifically targeted executive referral program that periodically mines recruiting leads from your senior leaders. Such a program can produce amazing sourcing results without the need to pay either a referral or an executive search fee.

An Alternative to Executive Search

The explosion of social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook make it incredibly easy for almost anyone to identify and build relationships with talent for executive positions. As a result, now’s a great time to bring executive recruiting in-house.

Unfortunately, many executives are not well-versed in leveraging such tools to optimize their networking efforts, nor are they well-practiced at periodically scanning their networks for talent that may be a great fit for the organization outside their own downstream.

Encouraging your executives to provide referrals by crafting a program that improves upon their networking skills and proactively pulls recruiting leads from said networks for open executive positions is a cheap and effective way to augment or replace the use of third-party executives.

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Facebook’s 250 million members would be a recruiter’s gold mine except for one thing: there’s a bouncer at every entrance and there are 250 million entrances.

The analogy doesn’t hold up perfectly because friend collecting is a Facebook pastime, and if you ask around you can almost always find someone to let you into any network. But it’s still not recruiter friendly. Unlike LinkedIn, where the search tools were designed with recruiters in mind, Facebook’s tools seem intended to discourage sourcing.

Yet those millions of Facebook members are too tempting a target to resist. Since the beginning of the year Appirio and Jobvite have both come up with applications that connect HR tech systems of their own or their partners with Facebook. Both however, are intended for corporate recruiters using either Salesforce or Jobvite’s recruitment system. Both focus on referrals.

InSide Job is different. It’s a Facebook application that individual users choose to deploy, making them searchable and findable to other InSide Job users.

The idea came to Lorne Epstein, a career recruiter, as he tried to get contacts out of LinkedIn for free.

Says Epstein, “They charge $10 for an email (there are corporate accounts, but he’s talking about an individual search) and there’s 40 million profiles. Facebook has 250 million and it’s only getting bigger.”

So Epstein, author of You’re Hired! Interview Skills to Get the Job, came up with a simple way to connect recruiters with Facebook users, and job seekers with the people who might be able to help them get a job. keep reading…

“Better late than never.”

Even though ERE Expo ‘09 (Spring) ended more than a month ago, I thought of writing this piece connected to that event. Thanks to an invitation from Todd Raphael of ERE, I flew down to San Diego from India and enjoyed making a presentation on “10 Secrets-to-Success of Employee Referrals in India.” It was one of the breakout sessions and obviously many had other choices to attend. To those who I missed interacting with, I am now making an attempt to share my thoughts again through this medium.

Before I got into the main theme of my presentation I shared some thoughts about India. I assumed that most in the audience would not have experienced India and hence a small introduction helped them to appreciate the context. My PowerPoint presentation is embedded below, along with this write-up. It will be good to go through that with the following synopsis in mind: keep reading…

Most people coming out of schools “don’t really want to build bridges when they grow up,” says Andrew McCarty.

McCarty, sourcing manager at the infrastructure/construction company Parsons, is trying to address this recruiting challenge partly by spreading the good Parsons word through social media. McCarty, along with Yahoo’s Carmen Hudson and TMP’s Louis Vong, is speaking at a workshop put on in Los Angeles (where he’s apparently a rare non-car-owner) by SHRM’s staffing-management association. He was brought to Parsons partly to help infuse higher-tech tools into the company, where many employees are in their 50s.

To help craft their Web 2.0 strategies, McCarty says companies should ask themselves the following questions: keep reading…

A conversation on Facebook today led us to TiVo’s source-of-hire pie chart (shown), one we had to share.

The 34% is employee referrals. The 20% are recruiter-sourced. The 17% is from the company’s site, though of course that begs the age-old question about how people arrived at the site. The remainder: 15% job boards; 11% temp conversions; 3% internal transfers.

The chart’s not so unusual. What we like is that TiVo shares it with candidates on its career page. The DVR leader will speak (commercial-free) at ERE’s 2009 Fall conference in Florida.

For more on referrals, check out the May issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, where Accenture will be profiled. The company’s a candidate for an ERE Recruiting Excellence Award in the employee referral category (winner to be announced at the upcoming Spring conference).

Sjoerd Gehring, global employee referral lead for Accenture and a marketer by trade, led the design, pilot, and now the global roll-out of a new employee referral program for the management, consulting, and technology services giant. Gehring listened to employees, met their needs, and got a big return. keep reading…

Times are tough. Even those companies that are doing reasonably well are cutting their recruiting teams by a minimum of 30% to a maximum of 90%, and tightening up expenses to the absolute barest minimum.

Half of these cuts are probably necessary anyway, the balance most likely an overreaction to the dismal economic conditions most companies are now facing.

There is an expectation that along with the cuts these recruiting departments need to drastically improve their productivity by 30%-50%, almost overnight.

The good news is that while most corporate recruiters are working hard, the majority are not working smart.

As a result, getting 50% or 100% productivity gains isn’t that hard to do. With this in mind, here are some things recruiting leaders can do to increase overall productivity by at least 100%.

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As the economy tumbles, and companies right-size their recruiting departments, the bottom-half is the first to go. Under this scenario, those formerly in the relatively secure 2nd quartile are now in the bottom-half. So be wary or get better.

With this sobering news in mind, I offer those of you in all quartiles this short, 10-point personal evaluation guide. While some of them are a bit crazy, they’re based on comparing your performance to the best in the business. It will tell you quickly whether you’re in the top 25% and how to stay there.

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Economic downturns, mergers, and acquisitions all place pressure on organizations to curb labor costs. No time in the last decade has that tenet been more apparent than right now.

Layoffs, large or small, force organizations to cut loose the talent in which they have invested salary and training dollars. While talent released during a layoff today may seem like little more than an expense, tomorrow it could be the difference between success and failure.

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(the chart in this story was updated February 23)

Once again referrals have turned out to be the leading source of external hires in the annual CareerXroads source of hire survey. In 2008, 27.3 percent of the external hires made by the 45 large employers who completed the survey came from referrals made primarily by employees, but also by alumni, vendors, and others.

Corporate web sites — a destination and not an actual “source,” insists the report — was second with 20.1 percent of the external hires coming from there. Rounding out the top three were job boards, which accounted for 12.3 percent of the hires.

No big news in those results. For the last several years the survey that CareerXroads principals Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler conduct every January has consistently found referrals accounting for about 3 of every 10  external hires made by the participating companies.

What is different this year is that 38.8 percent of all openings were filled by internal transfers and promotions.

“We found that very interesting, ” says Crispin. “That’s the highest number since we started this survey eight years ago.”

His explanation is that despite hiring freezes, critical openings still have to be filled. But, now that’s being done internally and the  jobs the transfers leave are simply being absorbed by the remaining staff.

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Several excellent articles have appeared here recently that have offered useful advice on how to deal with challenging economic times; certainly, many of us find ourselves helping our friends update their resumes, deciding where to trim out budgets this year, and coaching our organizations through headcount restrictions and freezes. ERE continues to be a great source of useful, timely information no matter what the business climate happens to be.

Right now, the business climate happens to be a little frightening. Since it looks like things will be like this for a while, I’d like to offer some thoughts on something that you’re certain to encounter in the next few months: a notable increase in executive referrals.

Anyone who spends time here knows that employee referrals are a simply fabulous way of bringing talent into your organization. The benefits are legion: employee referral hires are cheaper, pre-screened, more likely to be successful, increase employee morale, etc. A well-run program that delivers a consistent experience to both the candidate being submitted, and the person doing the submitting, will pay for itself many times over.

Executive referrals are a little different . . .

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Jobvite, the e-recruitment provider that emphasizes collaborative hiring, is releasing a new LinkedIn and Facebook interface today. Now, Jobvite users not only can forward company openings to their friends and connections, but they’ll know who among them is the best match for each position.

That alone makes the announcement news, but this is a game-changer. Even more important than the access it gives recruiters to two of the largest networks in the world, is the validation Jobvite is bringing to all those predictions about the value of social networks as a recruiting tool.

No need to point out that recruiters discovered social networks almost as soon as they came along. That’s true enough, but consider how they’ve been used for recruiting. It’s mostly been a passive exercise with Facebook and MySpace widgets enabling a company’s jobs to appear on individual pages. LinkedIn and others of its kind have been mostly a source of leads.

In the one instance, the social networks are little more than a job board in new clothes. In the latter case, it requires active recruiter time to source candidates, more targeted perhaps, but functionally not a whole different from using Google or Yahoo or other research tools. As recently as last summer Kevin Wheeler was predicting that eventually social networks “will become core to good recruiting and talent management,” though he called them “over-hyped and poorly used at the moment.”

Jobvite’s announcement today, and last week’s from Appirio, are bringing us closer to realizing as practice what Wheeler astutely saw as a trend. What the new tools from both companies do is to leverage social networks in a directed manner. Where referral programs pioneered by the likes of companies such as Jobster (site; profile) scattered job opening announcements like seeds in the wind, Jobvite and Appirio tell participating employees who among their contacts would be a best fit. Forwarding the opening is still up to the employee, but at least it won’t be an address-book dump. keep reading…

There’s a cool new app from a young startup making its first foray into the recruiting sector. Released by San Mateo-Calif. Appirio, the Referral Management Solution connects Salesforce and Facebook to allow a company’s employees to pass along job openings to their Facebook friends and refer them to hiring managers.

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Many employers are eager to tap the potential of social networks as sources of talent. The potential is huge, and facing difficult economic conditions, these can be a cheap source. But it’s easier said than done. Some employers have put up their own corporate pages on Facebook. But this accomplishes nothing more than to prove ignorance of online social media. What makes social media so popular is their, well, social nature. They enable people to meet social needs. This may seem as obvious as the nose on your face, but it’s amazing how many employers don’t get it.

The word “social” has many definitions, but some of the more appropriate ones are 1) pertaining to friendly companionship or relation; 2) Seeking or enjoying the companionship of others; and 3) living or disposed to live-in companionship with others rather than in isolation. The point being that people use social media as a two-way street and to get a sense of community. To belong to a community one has to have something to contribute and be accepted as a member. A community is people interacting with each other. It requires free flow of ideas and thoughts. None of that is delivered by a corporate web page, which is essentially static. People do not invite companies to be their friends. The same is true for recruiters wanting to get hires off Facebook. Creating and cultivating a network to the point where one actually has a hire can take a long time, and the ROI can be impossible or very difficult to justify. It’s not possible to say that X number of hours spent networking will result in Y number of hires and it is not a replicable model.

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If you work at a company that has recently cut back on its recruiting budget, but not on its high expectations, attempting to deliver can be frustrating.

Fortunately, if you have the courage to shift your approach you can still produce significant results using recruiting approaches that require little or no money. I am sure you are probably thinking that the old adage “you get what you pay for” holds true, but I am sure you also realize that there are exceptions to every rule (after all, ERE.net is free!).

Over the course of my career, I have compiled hundreds of innovative steps that recruiters and line managers have taken to reach top talent when other solutions simply were not working or they didn’t have the money to fund them.

I recently put pen to paper and completed a new book entitled 1,000 Ways to Recruit Top Talent, which as the name implies, offers numerous recruiting ideas, all of which have been used successfully.

The following is a checklist of some of those ideas that require little or no budget to implement. These approaches also work during strong economic times but they are especially appropriate during a major business downturn.

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It takes little effort to convince active job seekers to apply for jobs; however, the same cannot be said for currently employed top performers.

The difficulty in getting individuals actively engaged in their industry and performing at top levels to apply increases significantly during tight economic times because even the best-of-the-best are more reluctant to leave the relative security of their current job.

If you want to overcome a candidate’s reluctance and increase your recruiting function’s “convincing capability,” consider a friends program. It can add a powerful convincing tool to your arsenal and leverage your best employees to help you sell your opportunities to hard-to-convince targeted talent.

A Groundbreaking Program

The concept was developed in the late 1990s at Cisco Systems by Michael McNeil, whom I consider to be the father of employment branding and modern marketing-based recruiting.

The program is based on the premise that everyone wishes they had “a friend” inside a firm they could call and get the real, honest scoop on the job and the firm prior to applying. When the program was first launched, it was so innovative and different that Fast Company magazine wrote about it, as did a number of other management publications.

US West, now Quest Communications, employed a similar program. The approach was one I applauded at the time because it specifically addressed the insane level of competition for top talent that firms were encountering and acknowledged the impact of providing a better candidate experience on a firm’s success rate. While the program would probably not be as effective today if it were plucked from history and implemented exactly as it was, it could very easily be modernized to be even more effective today given the advancements in person-to-person and person-to-group communication technologies.

Employees as Supplemental Recruiters

“Friends programs” are similar to employee referral programs in that they both solicit your employees’ help during segments of the recruiting process. The premise is a simple: you get a small group of targeted employees to volunteer as “recruiting boosters” to communicate directly with preselected potential or current applicants who need an extra boost to excite them. The employee agrees to communicate with them (usually on the phone) for a short, honest conversation about their job. The applicant can view the opportunity to talk directly with someone in their job as having a friend that works at the company. Also, the informal nature of the conversation with a “friend” is less threatening because it’s a conversation among colleagues or equals and is more about addressing the talent’s issues versus those of the employer.

The friends concept is powerful because it utilizes the best salespeople for convincing hard-sell individuals…top employees who currently work in the job. Current employees in the job are more convincing because they “live” the job every day. They can discuss at length how the work actually gets done as opposed to the summary the job description provides and the overly rosy characterization of the work environment recruiters push. The willingness to coordinate an honest/candid conversation makes the company more credible.

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By Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

Here is the final installment of our five-part series on updating your employee referral program. Today’s questions are related to specific program features mentioned during the webinar.

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By Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

This article is the fourth in a five-part series on updating your employee referral program. Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 are online, and the last installment will run Friday.

Questions Related to ERP Impact on Organizational Diversity

24. Some employers are paying an extra bonus for a diverse referral, but only on executive or exempt positions. How do employees perceive this? Does that make diverse non-exempt referrals seem less important? Tying ERP bonuses to the diversity of the referral is a rather rare practice, but one a growing number of organizations are considering. While we do not have data from within those organizations that are already doing it, we do have data that indicates a surprising percentage of American workers are OK with the concept. Among the 7,400 employees that took part in our user experience study, 63% were comfortable with the idea of their organization incenting diverse referrals with a diversity tied bonus. In fact, employees are overwhelming comfortable with tying ERP bonuses to a number of factors including the level of the position being referred for (79%), difficulty of position to fill (75%), and post-hire performance of the referral (58%). Based on our research showing employee comfort with the concept and the business value of a diverse workforce, diversity bonuses are a concept we support.

    Unfortunately, legal counsel frequently objects to the idea, and implementing it can require that you tackle lots of internal political issues. Fortunately, we have found that merely educating employees that you’re particularly interested in diversity candidates can have an almost as powerful as a result, without the associated issues. While the EEOC has not issued any guidance on the issue, they are aware of several major corporations that have implemented the concept and have yet to take action against them, which may or may not indicate their position on the issue!

25. How do you communicate/promote “higher rewards” for diverse referrals? How do you avoid risk with discrimination?
    Assuming that the company’s commitment to diversity is already established and communicated, most of the work is already done. Your company already spends dollars targeted on diversity events and advertising to diverse populations, so spending money on diversity referrals isn’t such a big stretch or something that could be considered illegal. You start by educating your employees how regardless of their diversity status, they frequently come across diverse professionals who have the skills and experience that your firm needs. You then explain how your current approaches aren’t always producing the best results so you are trying this new approach.

    A few firms receive arguments relating to “reverse discrimination” but as in any case, you have to weigh the risks compared to the many benefits that accrue from referral programs that focus on diversity.

Question Related to Technology to Support ERPs

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This article is the third in a five-part series on updating your employee referral program. Look for the rest of the questions Thursday and Friday. Part one and Part two are online.

These questions are derived from a recent webinar on how to drive better understanding of world-class employee referral program practices and support continuous improvement of a sourcing channel that has become the dominant source of quality hires for many organizations.

Questions on Reward Methodologies

14. Any recommendations for paying after X number of days versus paying 50% up front and 50% after X number of days? keep reading…

Employee referral programs play an immense role in the modern staffing function.

To drive better understanding of world-class employee referral program practices and support continuous improvement of a sourcing channel that has become the dominant source of quality hires for many organizations, we’ve assembled 38 questions raised during a recent webinar on this important topic.

This article is the second in a five-part series on updating your employee referral program. The first five questions were featured in Monday’s article, and today we continue with eight more critical topics. Look for the rest of the questions Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

6. How do you ensure that you are getting quality referrals and aren’t just talking with people who aren’t the top talent and may never be a fit for the company? keep reading…

By Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

On Wednesday, November 12, 2008, more than 900 members of the ERE community converged online for a webinar led by ERE author, Dr. John Sullivan. The webinar focused on updating your employee referral program. The popularity of the topic during a time when many staffing organizations are facing tough situations speaks to the immense role employee referral programs now play in the modern staffing function.

While several questions were fielded throughout the interactive webinar, participants submitted more than 70 questions on issues relating to program design, program operations, reward trends, and impact on organizational diversity.

To drive better understanding of world-class employee referral program practices and support continuous improvement of a sourcing channel that has become the dominant source of quality hires for many organizations, our response to the questions submitted throughout the webinar will be featured in five separate articles this week. (Where possible, similar questions were combined to reduce duplication.) The first five questions are included below, and there are 38 questions total.

Our responses to the questions proposed draw upon our advisory experience with more than 200 global organizations, an in-depth research study detailing the practices of more than 240 organizations, and an end-user research study that examined the experience of more than 7,400 employees and their respective referrals from 28 different organizations. More detailed guidance on program design can be found in a Design Workbook written by Dr. John Sullivan and available at drjohnsullivan.com.

Those interested in truly developing a world-class program may also want to check out these past ERE articles:
Operating Referral Programs on a Limited Budget
Upgrading or Reenergizing Your Employee Referral Program
Employee Referral Program Killers
Budgeting for a World-Class Employee Referral Program
Metrics for Improving Employee Referral Program Effectiveness

ERE Community Q&A

The questions proposed during the webinar covered a great many aspects of operating an employee referral program including:

• World-Class Program Design and Features
• Program Reward/Bonus Trends
• Diversity Impact
• Using Technology to Support the Employee Referral Program
• Specific Program Mentioned During the Webinar

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