Employee referrals are a secret weapon for fast recruitment and a good quality of hire. But financial incentives alone are not sufficient to make your employees recruiters. We show you why employee engagement is the basis for referrals - and how you can maximise the recruitment potential of your workforce.
Employee Engagement: The key to success
Genuine engagement is more than just job satisfaction and loyalty: it's about personal conviction and being able to offer real added value to a good company. For employees to feel engaged - and hopefully recommend the company to friends and acquaintances - the job not only has to be enjoyable and adequately paid: above all it has to have meaning. Find out how you can give your employees this feeling and also significantly increase the number of employee referrals.
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Give regular feedback
Limiting feedback to just an annual appraisal - or even less frequently - can have a negative effect on employee engagement. Individual successes may not be adequately recognised, or even completely swept under the carpet. If your employees don't know where they stand, they won't be able to pass anything on to friends (in a positive way). Engaged employees appreciate regular feedback. It gives them confidence in their own abilities and helps personal development. And feedback helps them to better understand how their job fits into the team and organisation as a whole.
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Set short- and long-term objectives
Putting every employee in one huge project is not only bad for team building, but also for individual employee satisfaction. After a long, hard day's work only a fraction of the project will have been accomplished and your staff will go home feeling stressed and frustrated. This strategy may also leave people feeling anything other than valued.
Engaged employees prefer a healthy mix of short- and long-term goals. In reality, it's the short-term objectives that reflect what's happing in the workplace now - and help your employees to set their own priorities. If short-term goals help to achieve long-term strategy, your employees will feel valued rather than stressed - and communicate this externally.
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Be flexible
Sticking rigidly to your business plan may result in paralysis within your teams. If your employees realise that you're not open to new ideas, they will quickly feel like robots that simply execute instructions from above. Successful companies that have existed for 10, 20 or even 50 years learn early on that change is necessary from time to time. Motivated staff are able to modify their objectives and approaches, and develop and improve, instead of standing still. Flexibility encourages innovation - and good changes will ultimately drive the entire company forward.
Credibility in Social Networks: Your own employees as company ambassadors
Smart software can make recommending vacancies child's play: employees can then easily add a personal message to a vacancy before sharing it in social networks such as LinkedIn or Facebook. And it's also easy to track applications received per referral using a code. This means the employee concerned can look forward to an appropriate reward. You can not only increase the number of good applications, but also reach talented people who may not be actively looking for a new challenge.
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