Championing Employee Referrals During Reductions in Force
It’s quite natural for employees to lose their enthusiasm for employee referrals during periods when organizations are forced to layoff existing employees in mass due to economic conditions, changes in strategic direction, or migration of work. However, organizations are a lot like automobiles, even when budgets are tight, there is some maintenance that must be done to keep the auto functioning and to avoid larger expenses down the road. Vacancies occur inside organizations for many reasons, and filling them as quickly as possible with high quality talent helps keep the organization functioning and sets the stage for a more stable future.
When it comes to championing employee referrals in an organization that has recently or is about to entertain layoff’s, it is critical that the organization position participation in the employee referral program as a way to help the organization become more productive, more stable, and ultimately more capable of avoiding further layoffs.
The Continuing Need for Talent
There are many justifications for opening a new requisition in the midst of layoffs, and making sure that employees understand why the requisition was opened, why it is critical that it be filled quickly, and why those employees affected by the reductions in force are not applicable will help alleviate uneasiness with highly visible recruitment messaging during this time. Some of the reasons that may be relevant to opening a new requisition include:
- Spot openings – even when hiring freezes and layoffs are in effect, vacancies can be created by unplanned turnover, retirements, and increases in work volume due to location consolidation, key account growth, etc.
- Building a talent pool – some roles can take months to fill, so opening requisitions long before you anticipate actually needed new talent can ensure that when the organization needs to flip the switch, great high quality talent has already been identified and relationships established.
- New skills – often times growth into new product areas and markets requires access to skills and knowledge absent from your organization in its current state, making recruitment or retraining of those affected by layoffs essential. However, in a fast changing economy, it may not be possible or economical to retrain current workers fast enough to meet that immediate need.
- New locations – consolidation or growth into new geographic regions where current employees are unwilling to relocate to is common in organizations facing layoffs, resulting in a need to new external talent.
- Brand building – layoffs can damage an employee brand, especially if handled poorly. Employees active on social networks or in professional associations can help to rebuild the organizations image as a great employer much more quickly than centralized efforts, making participation in the referral program more important.
- Talent opportunities – another reason requisitions might be opened during a period of layoffs is the opportunity to hire top talent that the organization would have been unlikely to get prior to the economic chaos.
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Advanced Employee Referral Programs — Best Practices You Need to Copy
Organizations that collect data on sources of hire consistently find that employee referral programs produce a high volume of high-performing hires with longer retention rates, and in most cases, at relatively low cost.
Unfortunately, when it comes to managing ERPs, there are a handful of organizations doing it really well and a lot of organizations doing it dreadfully bad.
After more than a decade of collecting program performance data, researching program design, and writing a book on ERPs, I can attest that there are many factors that differentiate a great referral program from an average one.
Many recruiting managers with woefully under-performing programs think they have great programs and are somewhat shocked when they learn that, on average across all industries, 1:3 hires come from employee referral and that it is no longer uncommon for more than half of all external hires to come from employee referral in organizations with leading talent management functions.
If your organization doesn’t have an ERP, or has one that produces less than 30% of all external hires, now is the time to benefit from the learning of organizations like AmTrust, Accenture, Amazon, Google, Tata, Aricent, DaVita, and Edward Jones to improve your efforts.
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Read more: Advanced Employee Referral Programs — Best Practices You Need to Copy
A Checklist for Predicting Corporate Disasters — Is Your Firm the Next BP?
If people management practices play a role in creating situations whereby a disaster is more likely, then it stands to reason that people management metrics (long collected, rarely leveraged) could provide vital insight into disaster risk.
Put more simply, HR functions have a strategic responsibility to determine if measures of overtime, absenteeism, temporary labor use, training hours attended, engagement, etc., can be used to predict potential business problems.
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Read more: A Checklist for Predicting Corporate Disasters — Is Your Firm the Next BP?
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