At the Fall ERE Conference, Sean Rehder and Craig Campbell shared the secrets of their employee referral program. I was excited to see how they had applied some of the same principles that I had used in life insurance sales over a decade ago.
Before I joined the recruiting industry I sold life insurance and investments. I spent many nights sitting across the table from young families and business owners talking about their finance and insurance needs. I learned very quickly that referral business was the secret to success. I also learned that asking, “Who do you know?” didn’t get me very many names. To get more referrals, I had to feed my clients names, ask how well they knew the people, then ask if they would mind if I called and said we had worked together.
During the process, I was assuming they would help me, and in the process, I made it easy for them to do so. This broke down barriers and increased the number of referrals I received from each of my clients.
As to how I got the names I shared with them — if I were meeting a couple at their house, I would look up their neighbor’s names at the local tax office or central appraisal district. If they were business owners, I would ask about people they were pictured with at chamber of commerce mixers or about their competitors (these were my first sourcing activities; I had no idea where it would eventually lead me).
Below are the steps of Sean and Craig’s process:
What Sean and Craig want you to remember about employee referral programs:
So, start using your sourcing team to boost your employee referrals immediately. In the process, be sure to make it easy for the employees who know the candidates you source to help.
