Advertisement

TMP Launches Employee Referral Program on Facebook

Nov 29, 2007
This article is part of a series called News & Trends.

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.

The challenge for Hub’s team was, “How can we take advantage of this,” she says. The answer was a variant on Jobster’s Facebook program that launched six months ago. Where Jobster’s program is aimed squarely at job-seeking Facebook members, TMP’s taps into an employee’s existing network.

Here’s how Hub explains the program:

A TMP client signs on to Work With Me. A Facebook widget (a little program, essentially) is designed that allows the client’s employees who have Facebook profiles to post the company’s jobs on those profiles. The company promotes the Facebook referral program and encourages employee members of the social networking site to download the application (widget) and post it on their profile. The employee controls the types of jobs displayed. When a candidate applies and gets hired through the link on the profile, the employee gets credited for the referral.

Work With Me capitalizes on the “birds of a feather” principle that underlies most social networking. “I would think it would,” Hub says of the expectation that a Facebook job placement would be highly targeted.

By contrast, Jobster enables job-seekers to identify specific companies and sign-up for company news and job alerts. Job-seekers can also connect with company employees. Despite some similarities Jobster is closer to a traditional job posting, while the TMP program is closer to a referral program. Both, though, seek to harness the online social connections of job-seekers and employees.

This article is part of a series called News & Trends.