ERE.net

In response to that topic as an answer, a Jeopardy contestant’s correct question to host Alex Trebek would be: “What is the worst way to acknowledge an employee referral?” Anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of the phrase “tell ‘em to apply online” probably yelled: Wrong Answer! keep reading…

As the economic outlook improves, companies will need to rethink their hiring strategies in order to maintain their current quality of hire, as well as fill an increasing number of open positions. Much of this will require an increased emphasis on passive candidate recruiting, and less on active candidate sourcing.

In a survey conducted in collaboration with LinkedIn in late 2010, we discovered that 22 percent of the fully-employed workforce was absolutely not looking. Another 44 percent were open to considering something if contacted by a recruiter. Sixteen percent were discreetly looking, networking only with former associates. Only eight percent were actively looking, with the remaining 10 percent casually looking using search engines and job aggregators a few times a week, at most.

Surprisingly, most companies, even those using social media and Web 2.0 techniques, are only reaching the 16 percent who are considered active. This leaves 82 percent relatively untouched. This will have to change if companies want to maintain their competitive edge in a growing economy.

Over the course of the past 10 years I’ve identified eight core strategies for hiring top talent. keep reading…

This week we examined how a well planned alumni program can improve your ERP or even attract “boomerang hires” back to your company. Madeline Laurano joined us to explain the benefits of a successful alumni program.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

Recruiting leaders tend to be a pretty conservative group, sticking with tried-and-true approaches, tools, and methods. Because they are almost always managing from the weeds, there is little time invested in identifying, testing, and refining new solutions, but that doesn’t mean such solutions don’t emerge.

The inventory of available approaches is quite large, with many solutions existing under the radar. keep reading…

Job boards are far from dead. For the second consecutive year, internal transfers and promotions were the primary source of hire. A quarter of the companies that have a contingent workforce have no idea how big it is. More than half the companies use social media exclusively or as a significant part of their direct sourcing programs.

And finally, and least surprising of all, referrals continue to be the leading source of external hires.

These are among the highlights of the 10th annual Source of Hire study by CareerXroads. Released today, the study reports the results of a survey of 36 large, “well-branded” but anonymous U.S. companies who cumulatively employ 1.32 million workers and hired not quite 133,000 employees in 2010.

This is the 10th year that Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler have conducted the survey to see where companies source their hires. As has been the case from the beginning in 2001, referrals from employees, vendors, alumni, customers, and other sources was the leading source of external hires. Last year, the surveyed companies reported 27.5 percent of their external hires came from referrals. The percentage has fluctuated only modestly over the years. keep reading…

This was the seventh year of the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards, but it was the military talent category, added for the first time, that was mentioned by more judges than any other category, as employers searched for creative ways to attract the many returnees coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq.

One judge (Rob Dromgoole) wrote on Facebook:

Finished voting for Recruiting Department of 2010 and Military Recruiting Program of Year 2010 for ERE. Lots of great applications. I’m humbled by how great some programs are.

And another (Gerry Crispin) emailed to say about the “military talent” category:

EVERY ONE of the Public and Private Companies and Agency firms who submitted to this category are winners. They are ALL engaged in ensuring that an underutilized but highly prized segment of our population is getting up to bat for jobs and competing for openings.

The judges took this project seriously, some showing me the spreadsheets and algorithms they created to keep track of their entries and sending me feedback on what worked and what didn’t.

As always, you’ll hear a lot more about the finalists throughout the year. At the Spring conference in San Diego, the winners will be announced, and you’ll be able to ask them how they did it, how they overcame challenges, and so on. We’ll also talk about them more on this site, in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, on the ERE.net site, and we’ll ask some to speak at ERE’s Fall Conference in Florida (September 7-9, 2011).

This year’s finalists, in alphabetical order within each category:

keep reading…

Employee referrals and social media were already merging more quickly than Brangelina. A new tool from Bernard Hodes aims to make referrals and social media more tightly knit, and more personalized.

Hodes started thinking about all this at the end of 2008, going into the beginning of 2009. It has spent the last three months developing a tool companies could put on their corporate career sites, giving job candidates a personal suggestion of the jobs that might be best for them.

Here’s how it works.

keep reading…

Dr. John Sulivan joined our webinar series yet again this week to take a look at how you can utilize your employee referral program to make proactive hires. Learn how to tie your referral program into your marketing and social media efforts to recruit the best talent. As we’ve seen in the past, employee referral programs are typically the most valuable source of hire so make sure not to miss this important information!

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

Every action has an opposite and equal reaction — Newton’s Third Law of Motion

There is a dark side to a company’s ability to identify and recruit high-potential fully-employed passive candidates. The problem: the fully employed people they’re identifying, recruiting, and hiring now work for your company.

So as LinkedIn’s “auto-connect your employees with every job posting” feature becomes more pervasive, and Doug Berg at Jobs2Web figures out how to get everyone in the world into your talent community, and Monster makes sure your employees see that your competitor’s opportunities are better than what they’re doing now, expect some ugly consequences.

Here’s what I consider the domino effect of what on the surface appears to be a good thing — identifying great people and offering them what appears to be better career opportunities: keep reading…

By Dr. John Sullivan & Master Burnett

Over the past six weeks, we have attended eight large conferences that focus on or relate to talent acquisition. On the agenda in all but one were sessions dealing with employee referral best practices (and Master Burnett and Gerry Crispin will be leading a discussion of referrals at ERE’s March 23-25 conference in San Diego).

Since we have invested a great deal of time investigating both the design and performance of programs in hundreds of organizations, we always make it a point to check out such sessions.

After struggling to sit through nine presentations and listening to countless uninformed opinions, we have to lash out at the masses of professionals who manage employee referrals in their organizations yet remain woefully unaware of what constitutes outstanding, good, average, and woefully ugly program performance.

Below Average Isn’t Great By Any Measure

The first observation that left us absolutely dumbfounded was the fact that nine out of the eleven companies presenting (some sessions were panels) hired significantly fewer employees via their employee referral program than the average company, and that one presenter didn’t even know what percentage of external hires their program produced. keep reading…

Gerry Crispin, who with Mark Mehler runs the CareerXroads consultancy, sent over some new stats on employee referrals. CareerXroads surveyed 56 large, well-known employers about their employee referral programs.

More data from the study’s coming up in your November Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

For now, a couple of interesting graphs (click to enlarge).

First is a breakdown of the percentage of jobs being filled by referrals (albeit from a fairly small sample). keep reading…

Without question, having a large LinkedIn network is a competitive advantage for any recruiter working on hard-to-fill positions and hard-to-find candidates. This advantage is lessened dramatically with LinkedIn Recruiter, since it includes complete visibility to the 70mm+ people in their network. Since this full-visibility product is off-limits to TPRs, it levels the playing field somewhat for corporate recruiters. But this is not as significant a disadvantage as it would seem to those of us who have to find top candidates the old-fashioned way — networking. Getting pre-qualified referrals from people who will call you back is the real secret of recruiting passive candidates. keep reading…

I had an informative, and reassuring conversation this morning with the founder and head of BranchOut, a Facebook app that I wrote about yesterday, which has a potentially valuable future as a sourcing tool.

Rick Marini, an entrepreneur with an impressive pedigree, was concerned enough about the transparency issues I raised in the post, that he pinged me to clarify a few things.

What he said was encouraging. “We are very aware of the privacy issues,” he said at the outset of our conversation this morning. “We would never compromise privacy.”

In the team’s haste to push out the app, a few things were overlooked, he said. One of them, a rather important oversight, was any sort of explanation about the access to personal Facebook information that BranchOut needs to do its work. keep reading…

Without even knowing the name of your organization I can predict that throughout the most recent downturn you let your employee referral program “go,” so to speak. By failing to take advantage of new trends, technologies, and tools, and decreasing efforts to update and keep the program highly visible, your organization has allowed a number of program-performance-degrading-things to occur.

Unlike the previously posted list of program design features that can “kill” an ERP, these factors plague even well-designed programs, rendering them weak and ineffective. While much more likely to occur during economic downturns and periods of reduced or halted hiring, these program degraders can emerge whenever an employee referral program is neglected. keep reading…

It has been interesting to note the recent re-emergence of referral recruiting ventures and ideas. Duh, everybody knows that (employee) referrals have been the No. 1 source of hires forever (as indicated by CareerXroads), and that according to professor Granovetter’s groundbreaking research in the early 1990s, close to 60% of people say they have found their current job through some form of referral. No-brainer, especially with the adoption of social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., right?

However, between the late 1990s and today, many companies have tried to automate/extend/improve the referral recruiting process: refer.com, jobster, h3.com, zubka, YorZ, KarmaOne, Jobvite, and dozens of others both in the U.S. and Europe. All have failed or moved away from any referral recruiting focus, and in the process perhaps as much as $100m in VC money has gone up in smoke.

Why? No doubt many of the new entrants will back-up their fundraising efforts with the proverbial “But this time it’s different…” statement, so let’s pause just for a minute and consider why I think to date a lot of smart people spending huge amounts of VC money have failed to crack so obvious an opportunity. keep reading…

I have a suggestion for you . . . dedicate your summer to re-building your employee referral program. Now is an ideal time to invest in program design and rejuvenation, as in most cases, chaos surrounding the new year and year end is a fading memory and distant nightmare.

It’s also a great time because economic growth is just starting to ramp up, and with the growth of social networks and an unbelievable array of new recruiting tools available, opportunities abound. Why wait ’till competition for talent is once again über intense; focus now on optimizing a recruiting program with proven results and minute probability of failure. A recent poll conducted with several state-level SHRM chapters across the nation indicates that a majority of organizations are already dealing with significant double-digit growth in staffing needs, and anticipate that requisition volume will continue to grow throughout 2011. Unfortunately, those same organizations report that budgets are already stretched and that the recruiting workforce hasn’t yet recovered.

With that in mind, a key concern on every recruiting leader’s mind should be: “how do we increase recruiting capability and capacity to improve results without placing added burden on an already under-resourced function?” Luckily, it’s an easy question to answer. Retool your employee referral program and start managing it to produce the results you need. keep reading…

Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

Based on the registration response and volume of questions submitted during a recent ERE webinar on Making Your Employee Referral Program Work Smarter, clearly many organizations have retooling their programs on their agenda. With nearly a question a minute coming in from the hundreds in attendance, responding to all simply wasn’t possible. What follows is Part II of the public questions that were submitted (grouped, combined, and summarized) and our brief response to each. Part I is here. Looking for more detail? Use the comments functionality following this article to let us know and we’ll do our best to develop future content along those lines. keep reading…

Employee referrals and social recruiting, which already began melding through Jobvite, Cachinko, and other tools, are growing even closer as new vendors enter the field and corporations test how well their jobs spread on Facebook and other sites. Jobster has tried this all before, as did H3. But their mixed success did not mark the end of an era, but rather a foreshadowing of what was to come.

keep reading…

Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

The performance gap between the very best employee referral programs and the typical program is growing dramatically wider each day. Benchmark organizations dedicating resources and formally managing their programs are very close to producing 50% or more of all external hires from their programs — nearly double that of the average firm. They are also using their employee referral programs to accomplish objectives not directly related to closing requisitions, including increasing workforce diversity, and influencing their organization’s employment brands.

The increasing disparity in performance is largely attributed to the lack of management. Many recruiting leaders view ERPs as simple programs, requiring little in the way of resources and day-to-day management. They throw together a simple policy and call it a program. Unfortunately, such efforts lack formal design, formal goals, and often ignore a multitude of variables that lead to improved performance and prevent barriers to performance from emerging. keep reading…

Organizations that collect data on sources of hire consistently find that employee referral programs produce a high volume of high-performing hires with longer retention rates, and in most cases, at relatively low cost.

Unfortunately, when it comes to managing ERPs, there are a handful of organizations doing it really well and a lot of organizations doing it dreadfully bad.

After more than a decade of collecting program performance data, researching program design, and writing a book on ERPs, I can attest that there are many factors that differentiate a great referral program from an average one.

Many recruiting managers with woefully under-performing programs think they have great programs and are somewhat shocked when they learn that, on average across all industries, 1:3 hires come from employee referral and that it is no longer uncommon for more than half of all external hires to come from employee referral in organizations with leading talent management functions.

If your organization doesn’t have an ERP, or has one that produces less than 30% of all external hires, now is the time to benefit from the learning of organizations like AmTrust, Accenture, Amazon, Google, Tata, Aricent, DaVita, and Edward Jones to improve your efforts.

keep reading…