This post is an excerpt from Teamable’s ebook: 6 Strategies to Accelerate Employee Referrals. 

Empowering your employees to represent your brand and recruit for your company gives your talent acquisition team a vital competitive advantage in the battle for hiring top-quality candidates. By tapping into their networks and the work they’re already doing by attending events, participating in professional listservs, and being a part of the larger community of industry professionals your employees amplify your recruiting team’s reach and influence.

However, not all your employees have innate recruiting skills. The best way to help your employees become effective referrers is to build the right processes and find tools that help do the heavy lifting. Optimizing your referral process and removing barriers for your employees to participate will increase your company’s employee referrals, their quality, and their conversion rates.

5 Best Practices

1. Find the right tools.

Find the tools that allow you to gain visibility and leverage your employees’ social networks to identify, source, and engage candidates. The best tools will allow you to search across your employees social networks through one interface and will make it easy for employees to make warm introductions for recruiter.

2. Make it easy for employees to refer the right candidates.

Don’t force your employees to manually search through their networks, to come up with connections that match open roles. Instead, find a tool that can match your high-priority requisitions to qualified candidates from your employees’ connections. This keeps things low-intensity for your employees and makes it easy for them to get engaged in the employee referral process. It also makes referrals more powerful and relevant, so you don’t have to screen through piles of unqualified or irrelevant candidates.

3. Put the onus on recruiters and hiring managers.

Don’t sit around and wait for referral candidates to come organically. Make sure your referral tool allows your recruiters to source for passive candidates in employees’ connections and allows them to seamlessly request warm introduction from employees that own the connection.  Keep your referral program alive by making it easy and hyper-targeted for candidates, hiring managers, and your entire talent acquisition team.

4. Keep an eye on diversity.

In some cases, an employee referral program can create a very homogenous workforce, because employees refer candidates who are similar to themselves. A referral tool should help you proactively source for candidates from underrepresented communities  so you can build a diverse pipeline.

5. Accelerate referrals with the power of social networks.

After referrals (78 percent), recruiters find their best candidates through social and professional networks (56 percent). What if you combine the two? You can find stellar candidates through all of your employee’s networks—not just LinkedIn. With a referral tool like Teamable, you can create rich profiles for candidates sourced on Facebook, GitHub, Twitter, Dribbble, and Gmail. We’ve found that each employee offers up an average of 1000 unique connections.

If you’ve enjoyed this post, download the full ebook here: 6 Strategies to Accelerate Employee Referrals.