External Peer- Peer / Employee Referral Programmes
According to numerous statistical sources, 84% of people rely more on peer to peer information than any other source. What that means is, if you have 10 people in your company, you potentially have 10 marketers that can help you source future talent.
Peer to Peer is the gold standard of recruitment programmes. If you have a strong employee referral programme, then the majority of your recruitment should be done for you. You know you have a good Employer Brand if you are being recommended by your employees to their peers and connections. Afterall no one is going to risk his or her friendship by bringing a peer into a toxic organisation.
I will go as far as to say that how your employees think of you is equally as important as how your customers think of you. It doesn’t matter if you have the best product, if you don’t have the best-motivated team to deliver it to your customers.
There are a variety of ways to motivate your team to refer roles to their networks. Some examples:
- Money is obviously one. A financial reward, maybe a percentage of what you would have paid an external provider, is a strong incentive, however, this should not be your prime motivator. If you have to rely on hard currency then you probably haven’t built a strong enough Employer Brand yet, so maybe you might like to revisit that first.
- Social Rewards. Hard to find concert tickets, an amazing meal at a top restaurant or maybe something substantial such as an engraved watch. If you gave someone a £5,000 watch rather than £5,000 in cash, every time they look at that watch, probably for years ahead, they will think of your company in a positive light.
- Team incentives. Maybe you have departments in your organisation, if you do you could have a competition about how many employee referrals they can achieve in a quarter with some sort of team away day for the highest performing team.
- A charitable donation to a cause selected by the referrer. With this, you also have the added benefit that you will be able to include this in your Corporate Social Responsibility Programme.