The best candidates are right under your nose: Positive employee referrals will help you recruit talented people who are right under your nose.

Abstract: Editor's note: They prepare articles that tell stories and offer operational advice to entrepreneurs to help build good companies. For startups, how to recruit good people at the beginning of a startup is critical. Many startups are hiring and

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Editor's note: They prepare articles that both tell stories and offer operational advice to entrepreneurs to help build good companies. For startups, how to recruit good people at the beginning of a startup is critical. Many startups don't have a good way to recruit. What kind of recruiting methods can meet the needs of start-up companies to recruit excellent employees? The answer is: Proactive internal employee referral recruitment model. What is a proactive internal employee referral recruitment model? How do I do it? This article will give you one by one answers.

Many startups recruit new employees in the form of in-house staff referrals. The traditional internal staff recommended recruitment approach is generally like this: some of the employees in the company probably know what jobs are in the company, and they probably know that they might be the right person for the job in their network, but they only occasionally think about finding the right job for the company in their networks. It is impossible to expect them to devote too much effort to this aspect, after all, every employee has his own business to do. This kind of employee referral recruitment method can also recruit employees for the company, but many of the best potential candidates in the staff network are difficult to emerge from. So what kind of employee referrals can better help companies recruit good people from their relationships? The answer is: Proactive internal employee referral recruitment model. What is a proactive internal employee referral recruitment model? How do I do it? This article will give you one by one answers.

For the founders of startups, recruiting good people at the beginning of a startup is critical, since the recruits come mainly from the network of top employees recruited early.

The key to an active in-house staff referral approach is to select an employee to specialize in recruiting for internal staff. The Commissioner has three main tasks, one is to actively explore and summarize the company's internal staff network, the second is from the staff to understand the staff network of Friends in detail, If you are qualified for the company vacancy and whether you want to change jobs now, third is to communicate with the potential candidates from the staff network to recruit.

As the founder of the company, in order to recruit a good person from the network of employees, you can choose to do it yourself, or you can designate a full-time person to visit the job.

Proven approach

Many companies have adopted internal staff referral recruitment methods, including Pepple, Facebook and Chegg, and their specific methods of operation may vary, but the overall approach is similar. Practice has proved that this method is very effective.

In Talentbin, in order to recruit the best staff, I summed up my own internal staff recommended recruitment methods from the work practice, probably as follows:

Actively dig and summarize employee relationships

to select potential candidates and communicate with them about recruiting. Repeat this process repeatedly.

Employee networking: Finding the best possible candidates

This approach can be used to recruit excellent staff for various departments, including engineers, customer service and design departments. In the past year, I have mainly used this method to recruit sales staff, and I will use this as a case to share this approach. What does it mean to tap into the relationships of employees? It is not just the name of the person who gives the employee the knowledge he or she knows.

"If your company is really good, your employees will be very happy to introduce their best friends to work." ”

In the internal staff referral recruitment process, you need to set the recommendation of the reward policy, specific incentives, depending on the circumstances. In general, if the recommendation of the non-engineer is successfully hired, the referees can receive 1000 dollars to 2000 dollars in the award, if the recommendation is an engineer, then the recommended reward will be higher. Be sure to let employees know that the company has recommended incentives for this policy.

Employees recommend the person you know, and you will be actively selling the job while recruiting. If the recommended person is successfully recruited, the recommender can not only get a certain recommended reward, but also work with the best people, and in the process to promote the development of the company. The recommender does not need to do too much work in the recommendation, which sounds like a win, to make sure that your employees are aware of this.

In the process of digging through employees ' networks, it's too narrow to focus on people who are looking for a job or trying to change jobs. The only thing you need to focus on is: "Does this person meet our recruitment criteria?" ”

Much of the rest of the information is available elsewhere, and only information about the credibility of potential recruiters can be learned from employees in their own company. This is very important. I often repeat our recruitment standards to employees so that employees can better recommend the right candidates in their networks according to our standards. In the process of screening candidates from the employee's network, you can ask your employees these two questions:

"Would you be proud to be working with this person?" Do you feel excited about working for this person in a company? ”

When we recruited staff for Talentbin's sales team, we set the standard: "We want to recruit people who are talented and have a strong ability to solve difficult problems." "You need to use this as a standard to choose the right people in the process of digging through your employees ' networks."

It takes about 30 minutes to determine whether a person meets such criteria. It was a time-consuming and laborious task, but it was worth it. Because this part of the work is good or bad will be directly related to the late recruitment whether there are enough good candidates for recruitment.

Let's talk about how to work with employees to tap into their networking.

Mining Employee Network data

In Talentbin, we developed some internal browser plug-ins to help the staff network mining team more easily get metadata from personal files. The easiest way to do that is to use Google ToolStrip spreadsheets. The form includes referrals, LinkedIn or Facebook links to referrals, and email addresses for referrals. It's a good idea to add a list of notes later to record the status of updates. The following figure is a simple example:

How to screen out suitable candidates for recruitment

Have employees log on to LinkedIn to search for "first-level networks" and then ask them to give you feedback on their search results. The following figure:

With this search result, you and your employees will be asked to select the criteria for each search result, based on the criteria you have previously identified. Again, in the process of screening, you need to always remind your employees what their recruitment standards are.

After selecting candidates that meet their recruitment criteria and job requirements, put these people's LinkedIn file links into the Google ToolStrip spreadsheet. You can not fill in the name, e-mail address and other information, as long as there is a link address, the completion of this information in the latter part of the work will soon be completed. In the process, your employees may occasionally provide many other information about the candidate. If someone is very disgusted with the current work, is now planning to change jobs, etc., the information is also recorded for later recruitment links for reference.

Over and over again, I've found that every employee usually has hundreds of contacts on LinkedIn, and in the first screening, you'll probably pick 5% to 10% of them.

"In half an hour, you can choose from 500 contacts to select 25-50 outstanding candidates." ”

This is done on LinkedIn, similar to Facebook. You might ask, why use Facebook after you've used a professional social networking site like LinkedIn? Because most people's social networking isn't all about LinkedIn, it's usually just a part of it. The staff's network of college friends or the networking that they've accumulated in their previous jobs is usually on Facebook, not on LinkedIn. So if you're only limited to LinkedIn, you'll miss out on a lot of good potential recruits, which will have a big impact on the quality of the job.

Get the employee to roll up the contact list on Facebook and repeat the steps above, and you need to work with him to sift through the right candidate. According to my experience, each employee has an average of about 250 contacts on Facebook, so the time required for the screening is about the same as on LinkedIn.

If one of your employees has too many contacts on Facebook, you may be tempted to break out: "Oh, this is too much, how to choose!" "Don't do that. In fact, a huge social network is a boon to you. No matter how long your employees meet someone, they can still probably determine whether the person meets your recruiting criteria.

Once you've completed this phase, you'll have a list of people your employees believe will be successful candidates, including their social networking links and other information from the process.

Improve the information of recruitment candidates

Now it's time to refine the filtered personnel information on Google ToolStrip, especially the mailing address information. Mail is still the most effective way to contact potential recruiting candidates. Where can I find the email address information of these people? On LinkedIn, email addresses are generally in contact info, as shown in the following figure. On Facebook, it's sometimes difficult to find the email addresses of these people, but the email address may be in the Gmail inbox of your company's employees. If you can't find it, you can use Facebook to send messages or ask LinkedIn inmail, but you don't have to use this method unless you have to.

Having completed a collection of email address messages from a candidate's network of employees, it means that you have completed the excavation of a network of employees. This is also the way to tap into the relationships of other employees. If your employees have overlapping networks, it's better to recommend the same person, which means the people who are being recommended are good enough.

After you've dug through the network of all your employees, the list of candidates you get is like this:

It's important to tap into employee networks, but that's not enough. After selecting the list of candidates from the employee network, how to effectively carry out the actual recruitment process becomes critical.

If your team has a total of 5 people, including yourself. After the employee network excavation is completed, you will be given a list of 250 candidates for the job. Recommending your company to these people requires a lot of mail, as well as explaining to them that referrals are their friends.

Message content templating: What should be sent?

You should write an email template about the position you are recruiting, and emphasize that the reason why you send him an email is because of his friend's introduction, and his friend is also working in your company. Now I'm going to explain how I've done this in practice, and this is a very effective method:

1. First Contact: A simple one: Hi, Hello! "Then tell each other that his friends are working in your company, and then simply introduce their company and the jobs they need to recruit." There is a link to the job description in the email, and they click in to learn more about the job. Those who clicked on links, especially multiple clicks, must be interested in the position. For these people, you should record and prioritize them. As for how to know if the other person clicked to open the link, now there are a lot of tools to help you do it.

2. Follow up Contact: Start with a simple phrase "Hey, worry you didn't get my last email", and then repeat the last email. In the first paragraph you need to indicate to the recipient that this is the second e-mail message that was sent to him.

3. If they are interested: if they reply to your email, respond immediately and ask questions that you have already thought up beforehand. If the other person tries to answer your question, you know they are really interested in the job.

4. If they are not interested: "Thank you, but I don't need this job if they reply to the email." "Do not put the other person on the blacklist because of the reply. In this case, you can reply to the other person and ask him to help transfer the referral information to his friends and colleagues. This is conducive to the spread of recruitment information in a wider range.

This approach is very effective when I recruit market development and customer service representatives for Talentbin.

Send mail

All my mail templates are stored in my talentbin, and I can use the built-in mail system to see if the links are open and open several times. The following figure is the message style:

Now there are a lot of tools to help you understand whether the link is open and open several times, Yesware is a good tool.

After you send a message to a potential recruiter, be sure to advise the employee. In this way, if the staff is willing to do so, they can also send their own ads to sell reemployment positions, which can improve the persuasion. In addition, advising employees can also be prepared to respond to a number of unexpected questions from the person being recommended.

After sending messages to all potential recruiters, toolstrip their status as "trying to get in touch", and you can update the status at any time after the reply is received.

Messages that process replies

If the information you send is appropriate and the referrer is reliable, you will receive a lot of feedback about your interest. The first time to deal with these replies. For those who express no interest in the response, you may want to send them back an email asking them to share their referral information with their friends and colleagues. Don't underestimate the importance of doing so. One of the employees I recently recruited for Talentbin initially replied: "Thank you, but I don't need this job." After receiving this reply, I sent him back an email asking him to help transfer this referral to someone he knew. He forwarded the mail to a professor at Stanford University, who sent the email to someone else, and finally we received a lot of feedback from people who were interested and successfully recruited a staff member.

It's good to be able to get a response in a timely manner, but in many cases you don't get any reply to the message you send. If you use Yesware, you will find that some people have clicked on the link but just don't reply. For this part, you can use the "tracking contact" mail template, which is very simple, simply copy and paste can not take much time.

There are a lot of benefits to tracking relationships, and it allows you to show a lot of things, including:

You do not send a job to the other person, you really think the other side is more suitable for this position.

you are persistent and have a strong sense of purpose, from which you can let each other know your personal qualities and your company's culture and the quality of your leadership team. You send a message to the other person through the tracking link: you're really interested in him. Action wins Wan Yan, which proves that you are not a man who says nothing.

If you send a "tracking contact" email to a potential recruiter, let the referrer know about it, so the presenter can help you prove that you are not spamming.

Can you get this job done on your behalf?

OK. You can let others finish the work on your behalf. If your company is currently recruiting salespeople or engineers, and you have a recruiting specialist, it is a top priority to ensure that recruiters use the above methods for recruiting.

Reuse This method

The employee referral recruitment method described above can be reused. You can use this method every time you recruit a new employee. In addition, I suggest that the network of employees be dug up once in a while, once a quarter, or two times a year. Why would you do that? Because every employee gets to meet new and excellent people in their daily work life, these employees will add new people to their Facebook or LinkedIn contact list. Digging once in a while can help companies find the right potential candidates for the times.

Do it this way.

The staff referral method I mentioned above is not complicated, but it would be useful to write down these processes and methods.

It's a time-consuming and laborious task to sift through the best candidates from all of your employees ' networks. But if you do, you will never regret it. I have successfully recruited 7 excellent market development representatives using this method, and the other 5 are in the final stages of recruitment, and I am sure I will be able to complete the proceedings soon. All the recruits come from the network of employees in the company.

Finally, once you've got a network of employees, be sure to consider it the most valuable asset and take advantage of it.