Employee Referral Programme- The pros and the cons

Talent retention and acquisition is increasingly becoming popular in organizations. Companies to ensure that the best talent acquisition happens insist on using employee referral programme to poach the best talent available. However many internal employees are of just one perception, does it always really work.

However the trend happening in companies is that employee referrals are preferred for only experienced roles and hire on an average ten top potential referrals for every hundred interviewed for multiple reasons. So we can infer that referral hiring is an average medium to bring in top quality talent, as compared to job board search and social recruiting via the ATS (Applicant tracking), which continue to be the hot pick.

We have a perception that external hiring always holds good, as they produce good results in terms of hiring, but recruitment analysts opine that social media hires or job board recruiting is better when it comes to an efficient external hiring policy. It all comes down to not just hiring through a referral programme, but making sure that the “Referral programme” becomes a “Best Practice” and should focus on making the referral program more visible among remote positions.

Employee referral in certain situations breeds ego – slates between present employees and the new employees, as they presume that project-management roles will be taken over by the new hires. Hence Organizations are a bit apprehensive when it comes to Employee- referral programme.

Lastly but not the least, If you want a successful employee referral program, accept responsibility for managing the performance of the program. Never try to act in influencing factors and do what works best as the organizational climate varies from company to company. It has also been proved that a well-managed employee referral program can accomplish higher employee productivity and greater organizational profits. It’s all about implementing it and accomplishing it successfully.

 

 

 

New Features in LinkedIn Company Pages Adds Visual Excitement

LinkedIn has launched a Products and services tab, which is a new feature being launched by them for all companies. The Products and features tab enhances the layout flexibility of profiles. This makes the interaction more visual and encourages a broader use for the people in the company page.

Company profile on LinkedIn allows us to use the products and the services channel to highlight the kinds of projects and products that new hires will be working on. This thereby helps us to connect it to the project and the job opening posted in the company profile. This not only helps in giving a strong company presentation but also adds a higher visual excitement to the end user.

It’s even more critical that the message be as authentic and honest as possible, since LinkedIn members can post reviews and recommendations.

It’s a strategic move by LinkedIn, to show the companies in the best possible authentic manner as users can post reviews and recommendations in it. This helps in recruiting, marketing and sales a lot as it highlights a lot about the company’s technology, applications, services, product portfolio to the best possible extent.

This helps us in understanding, what it is the company is all about. Because when LinkedIn began allowing members to follow specific companies, close to one million companies are now being followed by more than 30 million users. Now with the launch of the rebranded Company Pages, LinkedIn intends to remain the dominant business-oriented online professional network in the planet.

LinkedIn beyond a doubt has established its identity as a career-focused site. Social media surveys, found that among college students 75 percent use LinkedIn predominantly for career purposes, whereas 76 percent use Facebook purely for social purposes.

 

 

Job Board Recruiting vs. Social Media Recruiting

Social media recruiting is gaining a brisk momentum. It’s not just in one channel but in multiple channels as the technology is freely available for everyone to actively get involved.

It has become a norm nowadays, that recruiting via social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter etc are picking up at an aggressive pace.

Companies are quickly coming around to it, as the candidates are already there and recruitment agencies are slowly implementing the fact that they need to be using the channel, apart from traditional job board search.

The question however, everybody has in mind is that, do job board companies really want social media recruiting to happen or is it becoming a threat they have to live with.There are some job board sites that have embraced social media big time and are genuinely using it effectively, this is for the reason that they have taken the time to understand the channels and how they are to be used for their benefits.

But, I believe that the majority still doesn’t understand it and pray that social media dies tomorrow or soon, which is not going to be the scenario.

There are two primary objectives of a job board – to get jobs placed on its board and candidates visiting the board to apply for the jobs. So why wouldn’t they embrace social media to help them? Why are so many still not doing anything social at all?

When it comes to objectives, Job boards has 2 main objectives, that’s either

1. Get jobs placed on its board.
2. Inducing Candidates visiting the Job board to apply for the jobs.

However, the fact remains that a good number of job board portals are out there blasting jobs on social media sites at random, thereby killing its effectiveness for job seekers. This not only damages their online brand reputation but also kills the job search interest levels among potential job seekers.

Job Boards are not active in ‘Candidate engagement’; hence they lose out on candidate retention, whereas social media recruiting is about candidate engagement and retention.