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You would have to be clueless to not be aware of the turmoil on Wall Street these days. Banks, investment firms, insurance companies, and nearly every type of financial services institution is facing severe budget cuts, layoffs, and bankruptcy. This kind of turmoil makes even the very best employees rethink their current employment situation. When people question their future with a firm, it provides an opening for corporate recruiters at stable firms to proactively raid Wall Street and to “cherry pick” the very best away from firms that in the past were literally impossible for most recruiters to crack.

For great recruiters, this is an historic opportunity that can’t be missed. The elite of the elite are teetering — firms that have for decades had their way with the best talent from around the globe. If you haven’t already developed a recruiting plan to poach the best individuals and yes, even intact teams, there is no time to waste.

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Last week, I highlighted the need for corporate college recruiting programs to include referrals by students and others to supplement a firm’s Career Center efforts. Part one covered the advantages that college referral programs provide as well as a few examples of benchmark best practices.

In part 2, I will highlight some of the action steps you can take to implement a successful college referral program including advanced approaches, tools, and some added tips.

If you want to generate a significant portion of your college hires as a result of your referral program, here are a variety of approaches to consider. Select those that fit your level of aggressiveness and corporate culture.

Things to Do

• Offer rewards. Surprisingly, many people associated with a university are willing to make referrals with no promise of a reward. Why? Because they really believe in the abilities of the students they know and work with. You don’t need to give away a flat-screen TV in order to be successful. Students will readily refer with simple rewards like gas cards, iPods, software, movie tickets, a pizza party for their friends, professional sports tickets, or a chance to win a spring-break vacation. Offer students a choice from a list of rewards. It’s best to start small and then increase the rewards if you find those under $100 are ineffective. Since every campus is different, directly asking students or trial and error are the best ways to determine what works. You can also offer campus clubs and student professional organizations larger rewards for successful hires as a result of their referrals. The key is to offer an exciting reward but not one with an economic value so high that it might cause someone embarrassment.
• Referral cards. Referral cards are under-used in both traditional employee programs and in college referral programs. Think of the excitement an individual gets when they’re handed a card that says “WOW, you really impressed me. You’re just the kind of person that would be perfect at XYZ firm!” Referral cards can be electronic (like an e-greeting card) or on paper. It’s important to limit the number you deliver (to make sure the people who get them feel “special”). It is also extremely important that individuals responding to such invitations to apply are not treated identically to applicants walking in off the street.
• Utilize your databases. Use the information you gain from other sources, including scholarships, participation in community events, and working with alumni groups. Data mine the information in order to identify potential referrers.
• Use blogs. Have recent grads and interns (and even college recruiters) write blogs that discuss what it is like to work at your firm. Blogs are an effective way both to attract and “sell” students on your firm. Ask your most successful bloggers to evaluate those that make great comments or ask good questions on their blog and to make referrals if they identify someone special.
• Social networks. Encourage your recent grads, interns, and employees who work in functions that target college grads to be active on social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Ask them to build relationships with individuals who show promise.
• Ads, posters, and campus radio. Although they can produce some good referrals, your screening program has to be able to handle a larger volume than when more targeted marketing approaches are utilized.

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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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Retailers have a sale, manufacturers slow production, but what can recruiters do with all those excess candidates? A few talent acquisition leaders are fast becoming inventory-management gurus and they are pursuing innovative ways to deal with all those extra candidates.

“We didn’t add any staff because responding to candidates didn’t add more work — we just changed our process,” says Catie Cowher, candidate experience leader for Recruiting Strategy and Initiatives at Wachovia Corporation.

Wachovia posts some 600 to 800 openings per week on its website, which includes both newly created positions and vacancies, and averages 10,000 applicants. According to Cowher, rejected candidates receive an e-mail informing them about their status and the reasons behind Wachovia’s decision. Most candidates are declined early in the recruiting process, following a resume review by a recruiter. Nearly 90% of applicants responding to job postings at Wachovia are declined. Giving candidates immediate feedback about their status was a process change that served up numerous benefits.

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The best recruiters I know execute the fundamentals of recruiting well and have developed good “habits” within each step of the recruitment process.

One simple, but powerful referral sourcing technique is closing each recruitment cold call with the question: “Can you do me a favor?”

As we all know, much has been much written about overcoming the objection “I am not interested…” or “I am happy; thanks, but no thanks…”

But in reality, you will not be able to turn a “no” into a “yes” in many (if not most) of these situations.

Yes, they might listen to your message (or pitch) but in the majority of cases, they won’t be interested or, they won’t be qualified.

Of course, when this happens, it is your job to network with this person to get referrals. Your ability to extract referrals and/or leads to help you with your search depends on many factors; including (among others):

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A significant part of my work involves giving presentations around the world on the hottest recruiting topics. It is an aspect of my work that I truly enjoy because it affords me an opportunity to continuously learn about where our profession is headed.

Through speaking, I not only help companies understand the latest recruiting trends, but I also learn from hundreds of professionals about what they see as hot topics, emerging trends, and how they are approaching them. I wanted to take this opportunity to share my thoughts on what recruiting trends will top the agendas of Global 500 recruiting managers in the next 12 to 18 months based on my interaction with more than 300 organizations around the globe this year.

The Latest Trends in Corporate Recruiting

Based on conversations with recruiting leaders, questions asked during seminars, advisory requests, and best-practice research, expect to see an increased emphasis in:

• Upgrading employment branding. Nothing is hotter around the globe in recruiting than employment branding. Firms throughout Asia, in particular, are increasingly adopting employment branding as a wildly important activity for 2009. The success of Google, a firm that has built the world’s strongest employment brand over an amazing five-year period, has led others to focus on this impactful long-term strategy. Key focus areas include increasing media coverage, increasing visibility online, building your “green” brand, and countering your “negative” employment brand. Firms to watch: Facebook, Google, Yum Brands, Tata, E&Y, Enterprise, U.S. Army, and Sodexo.
• Reinvigorating referral programs. Despite the growth of career-related Internet sites, the highest volume and quality candidates still come from well-designed employee referral programs. While heavy adoption was initially hampered by cultural issues around the world, today such programs are proving highly effective everywhere. Key focus areas include proactively approaching key employees for referrals (program targeting), leverage non-employee referrals, making reward systems more comprehensive, immediate, and visible, and last but not least, helping employees leverage social media to restore relationships, make new relationships, and build stronger relationships. Firms to watch: AmTrust Bank, Edward Jones, Whirlpool, and Amazon.com.
• Renewing the focus on quality of hire. As a result of strong research by organizations like staffing.org, recruiting leadership has begun to refocus its efforts on identifying factors that increase the quality or the on-the-job performance of new hires. Key focus areas include improved quality of hire metrics, calculating the performance differential between average and quality hires, and identifying sources that produce high-quality hires. Firms to watch: Aimco and Wipro.
• Reinforcing the business case for recruiting. As budgets tighten and slow economic growth continues, recruiting budgets will face constant constraints. Instead of whining, many leading talent organizations are seizing the opportunity to reposition themselves as non-transactional organizations. When the focus in recruiting is placed on non-transactional, more systemic issues, such organizations can work with the CFO and risk management to demonstrate the importance of supporting recruiting even during times of reduced hiring volume. The key focus areas include predictive modeling, dollarizing recruiting results, and showing the dollar impact of vacancies in revenue generating positions. Firms to watch: Aimco, DFS, Wipro, and Google.

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One of the hottest topics in talent management today is employment branding, in part because applicants rank brand as the second most influential factor when deciding whether to accept an offer.

Just five years ago, less than 1:10 Fortune 200 companies had a dedicated role to manage the employment brand, yet today more than 1:4 Fortune 200 companies have dedicated headcount and budget to the practice.

Employment branding is the practice of managing your firm’s image or reputation as an excellent place to work. Because so many factors influence how an organization is perceived, employment branding is loosely defined.

Most of the individuals involved in employment branding use a “learn as you go” approach, actively trying a market basket of brand manipulation activities to see what works and what doesn’t. Quite often, initial employment branding efforts are weak and full of elements that need serious improvement.

To have an effective employment branding function, periodically conduct an assessment or audit of the three critical branding areas:

• Your branding program’s design elements.
• The information that you provide.
• The approaches used to establish each of your sub-employment brands.

Whether you want to audit your existing effort or get a new effort off on the right foot, here is a quick audit checklist you can use to judge where you are now and where you need to be.

Incidentally, if your goal is to build a powerhouse employment brand like Google’s, recognize upfront that each individual audit item is important, so don’t skip a single one.

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By Dr. John Sullivan & Master Burnett

Employee referral programs are a lot like bottles of wine. Most companies have at least one, the vast majority of which are average or less than average, and only a few ever truly become exceptional. But the similarities don’t stop there.

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Some people I talk to generate dang-good results from their employee-referral programs without shelling out much money — some not even spending a penny.

Tom Mazzocco, for instance. He’s the VP of HR for the San Diego Convention Center. The center recruits from Jobing, Craigslist, Monster, CareerBuilder, military bases, and other sources (like when it needed a Greek-speaker and just headed over to a local Greek restaurant and talked to the manager about bringing one of his employees onboard for a while). Anyhow, the convention center brings in about 40-45% of its hires via referrals, which isn’t bad when you consider it pays nothing for a referral.

And then there’s AmTrust Bank, one of the ERE award-winners this year. The more I look at AmTrust’s three-year employee-referral increase (graphed below), the more I’m wowed. AmTrust pulled out all stops to increase referrals (something that’s explored in-depth in the May Journal, by the way), including donating money to charities for employees (such as recruiters) who provided referrals but aren’t eligible for money, as well as giving time off to the first team of people to reach 100% participation in the referral program. AmTrust pays up to $5,000 for the hardest-to-fill jobs.

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Employee referral programs are the most powerful corporate recruiting tool, bar none. They can produce a high volume of quality hires who have been statistically proven to have lower rates of attrition.

When designed well, they can not only be cost-effective, but they can produce one of the highest ROIs in the entire HR function.

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At VistaPrint they don’t know the meaning of the term technology bust. VistaPrint reinvented the printing industry in 1995, by bringing printing and marketing services online for small businesses and the result was billion dollar growth. Austin Cooke, vice president for global recruiting, was charged with supporting the company’s rapid growth when he accepted the position two years ago. He spoke about his experiences to a break-out session audience at the ERE Expo.

There were just a couple of challenges standing in his way: only 19% of the company’s hires were coming from employee referrals, and Cooke’s entire talent acquisition staff consisted of four contract recruiters.

Cooke’s solution: Increase the company’s recruiting staff by 700 people overnight, by engaging the company’s full-time workers as recruiters. Some of the key steps to his implementation plan included:

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by Dr. John Sullivan & Master Burnett

It’s no secret that employee referral programs are proving themselves around the world to be a highly effective and efficient channel for sourcing quality candidates. While many employers are drawn to the source based solely on attractive cost-per-hire predictions, those savvy enough to measure the impact post implementation are finding out that candidates sourced via referral are more apt to:

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By Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

As the global war for talent continues to manifest itself in an ever-increasing manner of ways, a nasty practice left over from an era long ago continues to handcuff recruiting organizations around the world. The practice we speak of is the gentlemen’s agreement made between two organizations not to poach one another’s employees.

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Employee referral programs routinely produce the highest volume and the highest quality hires in corporate recruiting. These employee referrals are so effective simply because they turn every employee into a recruiter. When every employee is a recruiter, you dramatically increase the volume of recruiters (every employee) looking for talent. In addition, because employees have broad social networks and they continue looking outside of work, you also, in effect, expand the amount of time (24/7) your recruiting effort is active.

Unfortunately, our extensive research into the referral program practices of over 600 employers has shown that most corporate referral programs suffer from low expectations, poor design, and weak results. If you are not getting at least 50% of your hires from employee referrals, either you have a company that your employees are ashamed of or you have a poorly designed referral program. If your program is under-performing, one of the simplest things you can do to improve it is to provide some of your key employees with “referral cards” that they can hand to promising potential applicants.

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TMP Worldwide has launched a slick Facebook widget, adding another dimension to online employee referral programs. Work With Me, as the program is branded, enables Facebook members to promote jobs within their company by adding them to their online profile.

If someone applies for one of those jobs - and, presumably, is hired - the employee earns the reward the referral program offers.

Courtney Hub, vice president, interactive strategy for TMP Worldwide, told us her team came up with the idea after watching the Facebook membership explode. Facebook claims to be adding 200,000 new users a day, which translates into a doubling of its current 40 million or so registered users every six months.

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To capitalize on your referral base network, it’s important to implement different techniques and strategies in order to maximize the return of investment. In this article, I’m going to suggest different techniques or strategies that will continue to build your referral-base network so that it will provide you with a wealth of referred candidates and yet provide you with a progressive recruiting tool that can diversify your results.

When you first started building your referral-base network, you used simple tools like meeting key people, asking for referrals from placed candidates, or attending professional networking events.

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Studies have shown that many organizations target as much as 33% of all new hires to come from the organization’s employee referral program. Here are five of the reasons why:

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Originally published February 27, 2006.

One of the most common arguments against launching an employee referral program has to do with the lack of budget for such a program. Many recruiting leaders and line managers are familiar with the stories of outrageous employee referral bonuses, and multi-pronged program advertising campaigns that cost serious money. The stories have helped perpetuate the perception that without hefty financial support, an employee referral program cannot be successful. That’s not the case. Approximately two-thirds of the employee referral programs in existence operate without a dedicated budget. While many of those programs produce mediocre results, there is proof that programs operating on a limited budget can produce world-class results. A number of best-practice firms have found that it is possible to operate the employer referral program on a limited budget or even with no budget all, if you know how to market and motivate employees. This article covers how referral programs can operate without breaking the bank. The Referral Bonus The largest expense item for most referral programs is the referral bonus. Approximately 90 percent of the programs I have encountered use some form or monetary incentive, the largest of which I have seen recently is $40,000. While that might seem extreme, keep in mind that for some positions you would most certainly pay more than that in advertising and executive search fees. The evidence is clear: Bonuses do positively impact referral rates. But it is also clear that there is a diminishing return as bonus amounts escalate. The average bonus across all industries for full-time hires is approximately $1,200. However, as I stated earlier, it is possible to operate a successful program without paying a bonus. FirstMerit Bank, for instance, set industry standards in referral rates without paying a bonus. The rest of this article will focus on some tools and approaches that you can use to get excellent results without spending a lot of money. (Note: Someone once said that everyone has a price, a statement that has profound relevance to referral program managers. The truth is that if your organization is a great place to work, what you will have to do to motivate employees to participate is a lot less than if your organization is a less than desirable employer!) Tips on Getting Great Referrals Without Large Cash Bonuses If you stand back and look around, there are lots of examples of people doing altruistic things without the promise of a cash reward. For example, many people regularly donate their time to charities without any expectation or thought of remuneration. Getting employees to participate in a referral program without referral bonuses requires that you think like a charity. To get someone to do something, whether it is to refer a friend or colleague, or to accept a job, requires that they perceive a positive exchange in value for what they are giving up. Again, value can be generated in numerous ways. If you can’t use monetary bonuses, find something you can use; it can be as simple as an honest thank-you or as complex as a raffle for non-monetary prizes such as a reserved parking space or cubicle by a window. The Best Option ó Use A “Give Me Five” Program Traditional referral programs are great, but you don’t need one in order to gather some of the best names possible (as recruiting prospects). Most referral programs are “passive” in that they don’t seek out individual employees and ask them to participate in the program. A more proactive approach is to actively seek the out the best people in your organization and directly ask them to contribute the names of the best people they have worked with. I call that program “Give Me 5″. The best thing about this program is that most people will participate without ever expecting a bonus or reward! The program is based on the fact that all of us come across some extremely talented people in our daily activities, but rarely do we take the time to notify recruiters or initiate a referral conversation. Employees know in their minds who these stars are, but need a trigger to stimulate the conversion of that talent from contact to candidate. Using this approach, an HR generalist or recruiter attends a regularly scheduled meeting of employees. With the permission of the meeting sponsor, the HR person simply approaches key individuals during breaks and ask them directly to help “build the team” by thinking back and providing the names of the five:

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While many firms fight a war for talent, that phrase doesn’t adequately describe what goes on in the healthcare industry. For most industries, the war for talent is a temporary condition that will eventually end, but the battle to attract and retain talent in healthcare is a struggle that literally has no foreseeable end!

In the good and bad economic cycles of late, hospitals and healthcare facilities have faced shortages, the most visible of which has been a shortage of nurses. Further exacerbating this nursing-shortage problem is the baby boom retirement surge that will tax the current healthcare establishment with a surge of elderly patients armed with disposable incomes and high expectations.

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Do you seldom have good candidates available as positions open up in your organization? Do you find yourself scrambling to find good people to present to your hiring managers? Are you putting positions out for search too often?

If you answered yes to these questions, you need to look seriously at developing a candidate relationship management process.

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