In everyday life, we often rely on recommendations from our friends and family. Whether it is a nice restaurant, good cosmetics, or an interesting place for vacation. We trust their referrals because they know us and we know them, so probably they wouldn’t recommend something that it’s not really worth it and wouldn’t work for us. Also, if we are to choose something completely unknown or go for the referral from a friend, most often we choose to try the second option first.
It’s no different when it comes to recruitment and finding new candidates for the companies. Our employees are great sources of referrals. We already have amazing team members at our organization, so there’s a great chance they know other awesome people. And top of that, they’re aware of who would fit a company best. After all, they recommend a person they would work with, so we can trust their judgment.
At TRAFFIT we’re perfectly aware of the power of employees’ recommendations. For more than four years when we open new recruitment, firstly the information goes to our employees. We ask them to recommend our offer to a friend who might be a good fit for a position. If we hired such a person and they worked with us for more than 3 months and both parties agreed to continue cooperation, we paid an employee who recommended a friend (until August 2022) 3 000 zł gross.
In 2021 the referral program had the highest effectiveness – we received over 300% more recommendations than in the previous year. Almost ⅓ of the company decided to recommend us to their friends looking for a job. The referral program is a great resource for recruiting, because who will know better who will fit us and vice versa, if not our employees?
Thanks to them, we hired four great specialists.
In the first two quarters of 2022, we hired two people recommended by our employees. Both are for IT positions. As we analyzed all of our sources and the time and costs of the recruitment, we concluded that the more qualified specialists we look for, the recruitment is more challenging and more expensive. That’s why we decided to change the rules of our referral program.
We established from the beginning the initial budget for each recruitment – 40% of the highest salary offer for a role. It’s also the amount for the successful referral dedicated to our employees. We still inform them first about the newly open role, so they have time to talk with their friends. But the referral is flexible. Once we spend some money on e.g. paid job board, the budget for referral is lowered by such an amount and it goes like this with another spending.
We really do care about the timing of the recruitment process. Having such a referral structure helps us to make it shorter, but with great candidates recommended by our employees. It’s best when we can give the whole recruitment budget for the successful referral to our employees. We rely on this source heavily and encourage our people to use the possibility to get some money and also to work with the people they already know.
Is it worth it? Numbers speak for themselves, but also we can see that employees hired because of the other’s referrals are a great match for us. It’s the source that should be treated as one of the top ones along with the candidate base. It’s worth investing money and time. We can’t forget about regular checks on how it works, because it can turn out, like in our case, that some changes can improve the whole idea and the process itself. So believe in the power of referrals and just go for it, because it all pays back!