Hug your referrals

by John Dennehy

Employee refer­rals are con­sis­tently proven to be the best source of new hires. Accord­ing to a recent sur­vey by CareerXroads, refer­rals account for 28% of all new hires, the sin­gle largest source. Job boards are num­ber two and com­pany career sites are num­ber three.

Con­sid­er­ing the mas­sive amount of money spent on job boards, agency recruiters and other sources it’s amaz­ing that the invest­ment in employee refer­ral pro­grams is so low. There are only a hand­ful of com­pa­nies glob­ally pro­vid­ing solu­tions to boost employee refer­rals and real inno­va­tion up to recently has been almost non-existent.

Last night I had a really inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion with Con­nor Mur­phy of DataHug. DataHug is a “rela­tion­ship search engine”. It inte­grates with a company’s email sys­tem to map rela­tion­ships between peo­ple in the com­pany and out­side of it. We got around to talk­ing about using it for refer­rals. Here’s how it could work…

An inter­nal recruiter selects com­pa­nies that are a poten­tial source of new hires. This is stan­dard prac­tice. Using DataHug a rela­tion­ship map is instantly cre­ated show­ing who in the hir­ing com­pany knows peo­ple in the tar­get com­pany. DataHug shows not just that a rela­tion­ship exists, but more impor­tantly the strength of the rela­tion­ship based on the num­ber of emails sent and when they were sent.

In an instant, a recruiter would have a list of all employ­ees in the tar­get com­pany that are known to employ­ees of her com­pany. This isn’t the same as con­nec­tions in a social net­work. It’s much more pow­er­ful because it shows that they’re actu­ally com­mu­ni­cat­ing, or not as the case may be. This could then be used by the recruiter to ask the right employ­ees to con­tact suit­able candidates.

There’s also huge poten­tial for screen­ing can­di­dates based on the rela­tion­ships they have with a company’s exist­ing employ­ees but that’s another blog.