Most of your successful hires are going come through your current team. However it’s not top of mind for your team to tell you about who they know to hire. Let’s explore some techniques to drive new hires from your current employees.

Hire the References

As you meet strong candidates during your interview process make sure to ask for their references. Even if the references were peers on the team, you need those names in your candidate funnel. We see that the references as the next step on the food chain and not a just a check box in the process of identifying talent in a competitive market. You will need to practice transitioning your reference check to prospecting call. This is usually accomplished by flipping the call from a conversation about the candidate to asking the reference about their current role. Here are simple lead ins to the conversation:

“I appreciate you sharing so much about Michael’s time working with you at ExcelNet. This will help us make a final decision. I am curious, what type of role are in you in now? Do you enjoy it? Would you change anything about the position?” As you guide this call, you could find some data points about the candidate

Broadcast Your Jobs Internally and Often

How often does your team get a full breakdown of all positions that are open within your company? Your team might be responsible for running testing and operations, but they probably worked with very talented Full Stack Engineers at their last company. We seem to forget that just telling your team about the opening isn’t going to spread the word to enough folks. How to fix this? Simple. Start emailing out the open positions list every week to your entire organization. Spread the word during your stand ups, town halls, and newsletters. Also, pass the word through your chat tools like Slack or HipChat. However, get the message out of your silo! The teams that are focusing on other projects might have the one away connection that is your next hire.

Pay Big Bucks for Referrals

The cost of third party recruiting can become over whelming. You can dedicate a part of that recruiting budget to create an effective referral program internally. This is a best practice that some of the largest and forward thinking companies take advantage of and it works. Paying your employees $1,000 bonuses for recommending great candidates that get hired can save tens of thousands from the recruiting budget. Companies such Capital One pay $2,500 referral bonuses to employees that recommend hires for the IT organization. In order to pull this off, you need have the team aware of the program and a tool to track the referrals correctly (internal web portal, Sharepoint, or Google Sheet will suffice). Partner with your HR department to correctly set up how these referrals are introduced and guided through the interview process. Also see if they can set a unique code or referral tag that can placed with the candidates profile if they apply online to positions.