Hiring through referrals leads to substantial cost per hire savings, better matching, faster speed to hire and faster speed to perform. The typical employee referral scheme delivers just 10% of hires. However, best practice employers have schemes that succeed in filling 50%, 60% or even 70% of their vacancies each year.2 Our system connects communities and simplifies the networking and referral process. It also provides ongoing engagement tools to ensure that the referral scheme is supported by the frequent publicity3 required to achieve best practice results.

Communities for employees, talent pools (prospective employees) and alumni (former employees) can be built to promote employee referral activity. Members of the employee community and the alumni community can refer applicants into the talent pool community. Members of the talent pool community can also refer ‘friends’ and ‘friends of friends’ into the talent pool.

The Employer Connections platform embeds the referral process into each community, integrating with existing recruitment processes and enabling referrals to be qualified and progressed through to completion. The entire process is tracked and measured, allowing flexible rewards for successful hires and incentives for contributions to first, second and third degree referral introductions.

Direct hiring of applicants provides major cost per hire savings. Talent pools are built to capture and retrieve surplus applicants from prior recruitment advertising campaigns. These pools can grow rapidly to a multiple of 10 to 30 times the size of the employee base. Our system is more selective and invites just 5% to 10% of the talent pool to join the talent pipeline community. This captures the skill sets most frequently in demand. Invited applicants are treated to an exclusive engagement experience in return for maintaining their own live searchable profiles.

Applicants can build and maintain their personal networks and group preferences and can participate in engagement features including networking, news, questions, events and library. Members can refer ‘friends’ and ‘friends of friends’ into the talent pipeline community in return for referral rewards.

Demographic shifts in the workforce will continue to reduce the supply of experienced knowledge workers over the next decade and beyond. An alumni community can be used to maintain contact and relationships with leavers and retirees. This provides continued access to knowledge and opportunities for the future rehire of alumni boomerangs.

Alumni can satisfy needs for mentoring purposes or more formal permanent, flexible, or consultancy contracts. Alumni boomerangs may have acquired new experiences and enhanced knowledge of competitive markets during their period away. They are also likely to have strong connections to existing employees and the good understanding of the organisational culture that enables them to quickly return to full productivity.