Friday, December 19, 2008

How To Effectively Recruit With An Employee Referral Program

By Cade Krueger

An Employee Referral Program is a great way for you to find job candidates in a rough economy. You have to balance your efforts, but ERPs can be very effective if used wisely.

What makes employee referrals so powerful is that it is that word of mouth marketing that can make a huge difference for companies just as it does for any product that is being marketed. People trust people, more than they trust big corporations.

A challenging market requires you to be smart with your budgeting and employee referral programs allow for you to find candidates without the cost of head hunters or external recruiting tools. Those other avenues like online advertising are necessary, but you need to use your ERP.

Also they can reach so much farther as a corporation than as a department that gets labeled as annoying. Let's be honest, a person would like to hear from a peer in the department that they would be working with, than a recruiter that has a potential bias just to get you hired.

There are a lot of ways to use employees to help grow your business in intelligent ways and to use their time wisely so they are not distracted from what they should be doing. You don't want it to backfire on you by getting disgruntled employees talking about your company.

One of the important steps is using some form of web 2.0 or interactive online marketing IM Chat or RSS feeds to get your candidates involved with your employees. If you put a face to it then people will feel more comfortable and get an idea of what their job would be like.

I suggest getting micro sites or niche sites for your employees so that way you can leverage their ability and save their time. They need to be well branded and able to optimize with some form of SEO or SEM.

These sites need to be well marketed and branded. The engagement pages from EnticeLabs TalentSeekr product allows for candidates to peek into your potential culture and exciting projects for your candidates. They do a great job of search engine marketing for numerous sites and they are worth looking at.

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