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Leverage "Leverage" to Get More Hot Referrals

By Lou Adler, May 24, 2007

This could be a very good article, maybe even a great one. It all depends on your point of view. For the chance it turns out to be a great article, wouldn't you agree that it's certainly worth investing a few minutes' reading time?

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Some of you are already aware that the title and first paragraph demonstrated a few fundamental aspects involved in successfully recruiting top candidates. First, you must capture people's interest. Second, you have to keep them engaged. Third, you need to make an offer that has a potential big reward for a minor cost. This is the idea of leverage in action. For example, if too many of your voice mails aren't being returned, you'll be able to use leverage to get a 75% call-back return rate. If your employees are not aggressively looking for top people to recommend, you're underutilizing a tremendous leveraging opportunity. Leverage allows you to maximize your results with less effort. Here are four ways you can implement leverage to improve your recruiting results:

Leverage Your Employee Referral Program (ERP)

Don't wait for your employees to give you some names of friends, who might, or might not, be very good. Instead, ask your best people to identify the best people they've worked with at prior companies and have them tell you something about them, primarily why they think they're strong. Of course, you now need to recruit these people, but this will give you some good candidates right away. To increase participation, mention that you're implementing this type of ERP at the new-hire orientation program and then broadcast it to everyone else. As part of this have a recruiter personally meet with each employee to help generate the hot names list.

Once this type of proactive ERP is established you'll want to push it even further. In phase II have your employees identify all of the people they don't know too well, but have heard they were very good, even if it's by reputation only. Then have your recruiters call and recruit these people. Under no circumstances let your employees make the phone call. You'll lose too many candidates if you do, but you would like to obtain permission from the employee to use his or her name, if this will help.

As part of this type of proactive ERP (for both phases I and II) you need to offer an incentive to increase the number and quality of these types of referrals even further. To do this you must give your employees the full hiring bonus for all of these referrals even if the recruiter does most of the work. Make the bonus attractive - $1,500 to $2,500 is great. With this type of program your employees will go out of their way to get names of some great former co-workers, even if they don't know them too well. Don't disparage the idea of a very aggressive and proactive ERP. Other companies are now doing it, and if you don't do it first your employees will become vulnerable.

Leverage Social Networks

The next few sentences will sound like a marketing pitch, which it is, but it really isn't.

I've just established a new Ning.com site called "Recruiting Tactics". Only people who have pre-ordered or bought the third edition of Hire With Your Head are invited to join. (See the banner on this page for our special bonus offer - my 60-minute audio CD free!) On the site we'll be pushing the envelope on using advanced recruiting approaches to hire the best talent on the planet. This is something you'll probably want to join, but that's not the reason I'm crassly promoting it. The point is the idea of using social networks like Ning and MySpace to reach out to more people and connect with them based on some common interest. Using highly specialized sites like this is one way you can personally use leverage to get known to others and get others known to you. If you're hiring recruiters you'll be able to see who has the best ideas, and you might want to approach some of these people directly to see if they're interested in working in your company. Of course, they might approach you to see if you want to work at theirs.

The real idea here is to have each of your employees establish a private network like this in order to reach out to others who have similar interests. This is how you leverage a proactive ERP even further to gain maximum leverage. While it might put your employees at risk to other opportunities, by promoting the idea of social networking as an extension of your ERP, you'll be deluged with top passive candidates for all of your open positions.

Leverage Your Voice Mail Messages

This whole system of leveraging your employees to get great referrals will come crashing down if you don't get the referred candidates to call you back. Here's an obvious secret you need to use to increase your call back ratio by 5-10 times: people will call you back if you mention the name of someone they know; they won't call you back if you just leave your name and some contrived message. Knowing this obvious truth, I make it a rule to minimize the number of calls to passive candidates unless I have a direct referral. So even if you're working off a cold list of names generated by some Googling or datamining techniques, your goal is to get referrals as quickly as possible from these people. Then stop calling the initial cold list once you get a few referrals.

Leverage Recruiter Networks to Get Strong Candidates Quickly

BountyJobs.com and Agency Referral Program (from HotGigs) are two ways you can tap into the networks of other recruiters. Specialist recruiters usually have plenty of top candidates available but no place to put them. By posting your hard-to-fill jobs on these sites you'll be able to tap into their networks to find some top candidates you wouldn't have seen otherwise. The fee you want to pay is up to you, but the point here is to leverage multiple recruiter networks to find some top candidates very quickly. These recruiters have spent an enormous amount of time and energy developing these networks, and they're willing to open them up to others at reduced fees. Since it's a contingency fee, you're not obligated unless you hire a person, so I'd recommend you try them out to see if they work for you. I'm not endorsing either site other than suggesting they're worth a try. The real point is the use of leverage to expand your network of top performers.

Using and leveraging leverage is the only way you'll be able get more work done in less time. However, even if you implement all of these programs it won't be enough. You'll still need to leverage your hiring managers to get another big boost in productivity. You'll find out how to do this at Lou Adler LIVE: Performance-based Hiring Tour 2007 and at Recruiter Boot Camp Online program. These workshops are a great way to leverage your time and improve your recruiting skills. I hope to see you there.