Social Networks Expand the Reach of Employee Referrals

Even going back to the days of the paper address book, recruiters have focused on making contact with individuals who could fill their company’s open roles. They cajoled employees for ideas and held Rolodex parties to encourage sharing. And though recruiters today rely on more sources than ever before, employee referrals remain the No. 1 source of new recruits, accounting for 20 percent of all hires, according to the CareerXroads 2014 Source of Hire report. 

What’s changed is how these referrals are generated. Today, the reach of every employee has been extended through social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook—so much so that Gerry Crispin, principal and co-founder of CareerXroads and co-author of the Source of Hire report, says, “It’s hard to imagine that a social connection isn’t involved” in most of the referrals represented by that 20 percent.

In fact, he believes that number may understate the reality, since many times a social referral may be reported as having come from another channel. For example, a recruiter might label a hire as being from a direct source when in fact it resulted from a LinkedIn connection’s network.

It’s no surprise that social media has gotten the attention of recruiters. What before had been a laborious process—working the phones and attending conferences in a quest for industry contacts—has become far simpler. In the old days, using your network was “expensive” in terms of effort, notes Ben Casnocha, co-author of The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014). “As the effort has dropped, an introduction can be a click away,” he says.

Tapping into employees’ social networks, then, seems like a natural step to take. However, doing so can be a double-edged sword, say recruiters, HR professionals and others who have studied both social media and employee referral programs. While worker input can enhance a company’s ability to connect the right candidates to the right opportunities, it also increases the pressure to provide a stellar candidate experience, lest word get back to employees that their connections are being neglected. 

Plus, in an era when privacy is a sensitive topic and the boundaries between work and personal lives sometimes get uncomfortably blurred, an ill-conceived effort can result in frustration, mistrust and outright resentment.

In short, developing a social referral program isn’t easy. Like so many things involving social media, the ability to gain real value depends on how much effort you’re willing to put in and how engaged your employees are in the first place.

“Social media and employer branding are only tools. They’re not a strategy,” says Lars Schmidt, founder of Amplify Talent, an HR and recruiting consultancy. “You have to do more than just be there. You still have to have a good candidate experience and a good workflow. You need the fundamentals.”

Ben Gotkin, principal consultant at Recruiting Toolbox, shares that sentiment. “It always comes back to the core fundamentals,” he says. “If you don’t have referrals built into your culture in the first place, [employees are] not going to be engaged. People see this as a silver bullet and a shortcut, and it’s not going to work that way.”

The Fundamentals

First, let’s be clear on what we’re talking about here: the idea of leveraging your employees’ social networks to connect with qualified candidates, active or passive. That’s a lot different from maintaining a company Facebook page or from using LinkedIn or your own detective work to track down candidates through job postings. 

It also involves more than simply encouraging employees to share openings through their tweets or status updates. While there’s certainly value in raising awareness that way, social networking shows its real power when it gets down to the individual level, where the conversations actually take place. “Social networking is good at starting relationships,” says John Sullivan, a professor of management at San Francisco State University who has worked extensively with employee referral programs. But guiding those conversations and developing those relationships require a level of exertion that no automated system can achieve.

In fact, much of an effort’s success depends on factors that aren’t related to social media at all—things like employee training and the time it takes recruiters to respond to a candidate’s query. And while your stream of candidates may grow, you’ll still face issues around quality. “You’re casting a wider net,” says Steve Levy, a global recruiter for the open-source video platform Kaltura. As a result, not every candidate will be qualified.

“Social networks enable employees to reach like-minded, potentially qualified friends, but they also have the potential to generate a lot of noise and a lot of applicant churn,” adds Antonia Cusumano Binetti, an advisory principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers who focuses on talent management. “If employers haven’t mastered the basics of a traditional referral program, they’re going to find it difficult to layer in the complexity of social networking on top of that.”

Your Employees’ World

As with traditional employee referral programs, the current workforce’s enthusiasm is key to success. Without employees’ willingness to engage their connections on behalf of the company, recruiting via employees’ social media connections may be no more effective than using job postings on the corporate website. And, though technology makes it relatively easy to analyze employees’ networks and identify connections between them and a candidate, there’s a lot more to it in terms of managing the human relationships, particularly those between recruiters and employees. Experts emphasize the importance of transparency and making sure the employee feels that he or she is the one in the driver’s seat.

“It can be a sensitive area,” Schmidt says. “The social networks are the employees’. People conscientiously build their networks, and companies have to be sensitive to how they deploy their programs.” 

Part of that involves finding the happy medium between a business’s desire to control the message and the fact that what employees post on their social networks is up to them. “I think most people don’t want their social networks to become propaganda sites but don’t mind occasional sharing,” says Jim Stroud, senior director of RPO Recruiting Strategies and Support at Randstad Sourceright US and author of Content Is the New Sourcing: Strategies for Attracting and Engaging Passive Candidates (CreateSpace, 2014). “Companies shouldn’t try to make employees feel like they have to share. They have to give them things they want to share.”

Complicating matters is the level of comfort people have with social media in general. Baby Boomers and members of Generation X have followed Millennials into the social media world, but they are still getting comfortable there, Binetti notes. “They’re often the ones making hiring decisions or even leading recruiting functions—which is why we still see so much uncertainty over how to use social media successfully,” she says.

Younger workers, on the other hand, “realize their career security—as opposed to their job security—depends on a vibrant professional network,” Casnocha says. “It’s really attractive to young, networking-savvy employees if you encourage them and enable them to develop their network. Enabling that is one of the greatest perks you can offer them.” 

That means how you approach discussions with employees may depend in large part on the age of the people you’re dealing with. Millennials may be more open than older workers to discussions that include Facebook and Instagram, for example. Most people understand that LinkedIn is a professional network used for business purposes. Conversations can be trickier if a company wants to look at an employee’s Facebook friends. Either way, being forthright is key. “Recruiters need to be upfront about why they’re looking at someone’s network,” Gotkin says.