Leveraging the Power of Social Media for Employee Referrals

 Recruiting is all about communication, and modern times have witnessed several shifts. Internet capacity has expanded to the point where instant interaction is within everybody's grasp. As timing becomes more immediate, the way that people search and connect is advancing. This boils down to a quicker recruiting cycle - you need to source and sort the relevant candidates before your competitors do.

Today there is a growing importance of engagement and relationship building with potential candidates. With the modified communication patterns, candidates expect two-way interactions with recruiters. There is an increased focus on the cultivation of relationships with potential candidates, creating bonds based on trust, feedback and transparency - not just posting a position on a job board and playing the waiting game.

Strengthening organization's online reputation by connecting with the online community (reaching out through social media, organization website, and pay-per-click ads, for starters) and marketing your organization, as an amazing place to work is the need of the hour.

And this is possible by leveraging the power of social media with employee referral program of the organization. The recruitment software will reach the employees and engage them as recruitment ambassadors.

Benefits of Leveraging Social Media with Employee Referral Program:

1. Increases Job Visibility

With hundreds of millions of people on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, using social networking platforms for recruiting will ensure that your job openings will be seen and read by a larger number of qualified candidates.

2. Increases the Quality of Hire

People who frequently use social media may be considered early adopters, who are highly desirable in the job market at the moment. Using social media to recruit will therefore attract this group of people, who are normally more technically savvy and innovative.

3. Raises Brand Awareness

Using social media platforms will not only increase your overall organization visibility, it will also let potential employees know that you are with the trends of social networking. Opportunities to interact with potential candidates through social networking sites can also help position organization brands by targeting workers in a more dynamic way.

4. Improves Referrals

Employee Referrals are definitely of the best kind of business lead, so why not apply the same principal to jobs? Social recruiting can help you make more people aware of your organization's current job opportunities through spreading the information through various social media means.

5. Inspires Employees

Posting jobs to your organization's social media platforms is also an indirect way of empowering your employees to spread the word. Employees and followers can simply choose to share a link to another person's profile

6. Reduces the Cost to Hire

The recruiting-related transactional costs through social recruiting are typically lower in comparison to other sources. Less money can be allocated to traditional job advertisements and put towards social recruiting strategies and implementing related tactics.

7. It's Engaging

Social media is about connecting and having engaging conversations through sharing great content. Putting together a strong social recruiting strategy will help to define what type of content you think will be valuable to share with the candidates with whom you would like to engage.

8. Wide Reach

With more than 800 million active users on Facebook alone, 50% of which log on to Facebook in any given day, many recruiters and hiring managers are leveraging social media's wide reach and large audience for influencing potential candidates. Social recruiting has a lot of opportunities in today's scenario of cost effectiveness.

Along with these some other benefits of leveraging social media with employee referral program are as under:

Social media helps to develop new, passive talent streams and strengthens employment branding, unlike some job portals that offer only active job seekers. Social media allows recruiters to observe and assess with potential hires in targeted talent communities with engagement initiatives. More importantly, social media pages help to drive traffic to the organization career site.

Employees can help guide organizations to the best online mediums for recruitment. As Dale Carnegie said, "Grade-A people know other grade-A people." With this, your employees will know other like-minded colleagues who might be the perfect candidates. Employees can help define what online tools they and their colleagues use.

Employees can also enable branding of the organization in the social world. If you have a great culture and work environment, employees will naturally spread the corporate karma to their networks, creating awareness of their fabulous employer.

Through social networks can find a lot of information about candidates through their social networking pages, making background and reference checks more wide-ranging than before.

Employee referral programs (ERP's) are a vital component in developing an effective recruitment strategy for any successful organization. They provide companies with numerous and It is quintessential that organizations use ERP's to their full potential.

Social media is fast becoming a critical part of the recruitment and employee engagement tool kit as organizations adapt to the new digital age. "Social Media Recruitment" is the new mantra of organizations today. To optimize your referral program, leveraging social media is absolutely imperative. Social media allows you to create connections with passive candidates, and allows you to broadcast your brand efficiently while gaining strong attention. Social Media recruiting is the need of the day. Organization these days utilizes Social media platform or website as a battleground recruitment programs. The rise of social media has moved beyond social interaction to providing a powerful recruitment tool. Effective use of social media requires a nuanced and strategic approach that differentiates tactics according to the target audience, and presents a clear vision and experience of the employer Brand. Organizations also need to systematically engage their internal audiences in their engagement and recruitment strategies. That means empowering employees with the tools, training, trust and time to become authentic, active advocates which will enable you to stay to stand out among the competition. One of the ways you can do just that is to take advantage of the employee referral program and use the right employee referral software.

The "employee referral software" is usually a program that is embedded within social networking platforms as well as personal websites that belong to employees of these organizations. These tools usually make use of links that can uniquely identify each employee that owns it. Organizations looking for the right employees to fill in their job vacancies then offer incentives to their current employees in order to reward them for the best referrals made. This allows them to fill in those vacant positions at the minimum possible costs, while enabling their most perceptive employees earn additional money.