If you are like most talent acquisition professionals, you receive referrals from employees in a variety of ways (via email, phone, direct conversation) and use spreadsheets to do the tracking. A typical scenario works like this:
Your employee tells you about someone they used to work with that might be a good fit for an open position. They give you their email address and phone number and tell you that the prospect is expecting your call. Before you do anything, you add the prospect’s name to a spreadsheet in one column, the name of the employee who referred the prospect in another column, and the position you are going to discuss with them in another column.
Free Referral Tracking Spreadsheet
After connecting with the prospect, she sends you her resume via email, and you immediately add it to your Applicant Tracking System. A few weeks of interviewing goes by and soon you have an offer to present to the candidate, which she accepts, and agrees to start 2 weeks later.
You convert her in the ATS to “hired” status, and your HR team begins the on-boarding process. One of your recruiting coordinators pulls that month’s new hire report and compares all new hires to the “referral spreadsheet” and sees that this particular candidate was indeed an employee referral. The coordinator then informs HR/payroll to make sure a referral bonus is added to that employee’s check in 60-90 days.
3 months later, your VP asks you to generate a report to see which of your regions are submitting the most referrals, and which region has the highest percentage of hires from referrals. The VP also wants to know the top 10 referrers among your employee base, which numbers in the thousands. So you and your coordinator dust off the spreadsheet and set out to uncover the numbers, which winds up taking hours.
If you are looking for something a little more robust, you can consider trying out our Employee Referral Tracking software, which gives the added benefits of automatic reporting. Even with the simple form option, you’ll still have to spend time combing through the data to find the reporting you are looking for. With automation, that data is available to you with a few clicks.
By giving your employees a central environment to login to when they have a referral to submit, everything is track able and tied to that particular employee. You can ask for as much or as little detail as you want (could be just a name, or could be an entire cover letter and resume), but either way, you’ll be able to have that invaluable data your VP is inevitable going to ask for right at your fingertips.
Whatever approach you choose, its time to stop relying on spreadsheet and add some automation to your process. Please let us know if we can help you get the ball rolling in any capacity.