The Modern Way to Utilise Employee Referrals

Orla Doyle

3 minute read

If You're Not Utilising Employee Referrals To Hire...You Should Be!

At Occupop, our goal is to ensure you have the most efficient recruitment process possible, helping you attract and hire the best candidates. A part of this is teaming up with modern recruitment solution providers who can also help you greatly improve your recruitment. With that in mind we have teamed up with HireUp to bring you insights into modern employee referrals trends and ways your business can utilise and promote employee referrals in the current recruitment landscape.

Head of engagement at HireUp, Gary Berney, speaks to us today on the advantages of modernising employee referrals programmes and how HireUp can help businesses attract and retention the best talent.

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Why, in general, are referral programmes so unsuccessful?

When most referral programmes are created their goal is to show employees new vacancies in the company and get the employee to recommend the job to a friend. Fundamentally, that’s fine, except very little time is spent thinking about the how, when and where. How are employees going to inform their network of contacts about the roles? When are they going to be able to tell their network and where can they access the information? The result is a very slow, often manual, process that doesn’t engage the employees and wastes a lot of HR time.

What makes HireUp different?

We put the employee at the heart of the referral process. Without the right level of engagement with the employee, companies will not get the referral numbers they require. So we looked at how they access information and found it’s predominantly via mobile. We then at how information is shared and found that most information sharing takes place via mobile too. Finally, where do they access and share that information? and found that it’s via their mobiles at a time and place that suits them. In others words we needed to devise an intuitive mobile referral app to allow employees to easily and quickly share job vacancies with their network and that’s exactly what HireUp is.

Is it easy to integrate HireUp into existing HR systems?

Yes, it’s very straight forward and made even easier when you’re dealing with a dynamic ATS provider like Occupop. We integrated with them inside of 2 weeks. That process, at its worst, has been up to 4-6 months with legacy ATS providers, simply because we can only move at their pace, which in general is very slow! typically though it’s between 4-6 weeks with the majority of ATS providers.

How long does it take for clients To notice the difference in referral numbers?

Success is almost instantaneous after the launch of our referral app. Most of our clients see a return on investment inside of one to two months, which we’re delighted about. The feedback is always positive, as they realise HireUp does exactly what we said it will do - Engage employees and make it considerably easier for them to share job vacancies with their network at a time and place that suits them. Which in turn leads to more referral candidates.

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Can you use HireUp globally?

Yes, we work with global clients to roll out HireUp among all their global locations, changing languages, where necessary, and supporting local social media platforms e.g. Russian employees within global companies would tend to use VKontakte or Odnoklassniki as well as more well known platforms to share company vacancies. Whether global or in one location in the world we can support any client.

What has been the most surprising success from using the app?

We knew the app would provide clients with better quality candidates, but I guess the most surprising aspect is how much faster the hiring process becomes on the back of that quality of candidate. Clients are currently running at an average of 10 days faster hiring time when using HireUp. Clients say it’s because the candidates are more prepared, already know the good and the bad about the company and so have reasonable expectations when applying and because background checks can be carried out far more quickly. All that leads to faster hires with a greater propensity to stay long term, which means the attrition rates slow down as does the need to hire, so there’s lots of wins.

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