Top 4 Ways to Find (and Approach) a Referral Candidate
Sloane BarbourIt’s no secret that “referral candidates” are typically the best candidates that you will find during your search for that next hire. Who are these referral candidates? Where do they hide? How can I find them!
These are all great questions...In this post I will try to tackle the myth of the referral candidate and provide some tips and tricks to help you find them. You’d be surprised, often times they are hiring right under your nose.
1. Start in your backyard
Many organizations have incentive programs designed to encourage their internal staff to refer a friend or former colleague who they would endorse for any particular position. Often times this incentive can be in the form of a cash bonus, additional time off, or simple recognition. Make sure that even if you are hiring in your engineering department, you ping your marketing, sales, accounting, and operations team to see who has friends, former colleagues, or even family members who are in technology.
2. Get involved with the community
Some of the best interactions that I have had with potential clients and candidates have been at local community events. Kevin Winston and the folks over at DigitalLA host events locally here in LA and Orange County specifically targeted towards professionals in digital media, marketing, technology, and software. Usually these events are free, or a couple bucks donation, and you end up meeting some great people on both a personal and professional level. You may not find your perfect candidate, but the relationships you garner from attending these events, and the cocktails, are worth the visit!
3. Jump on the social networking bandwagon
This is probably the most talked about (and tweeted about) trend when it comes to candidate sourcing and identification. The concept is great: jump online, join some social networks, and start sending out messages to former colleagues about your job opening. Seems easy enough, right? The simple answer is yes. Social and professional online networks have been around in some capacity (remember BBS?) for several decades. The real significant difference between then and now is the user base.The question most of my clients ask me is how to get started. Some of the best resources I have found are articles on blogs like Mashable, which focus on advances in social media in general. You can often find a few great articles that are targeted directly towards recruiting, and often those articles give you an in depth look at how and where to go to find potential candidates. The most popular method currently is LinkedIN, given the fact that it is a social network specifically targeted towards business professionals. I will dive into much more specific detail on this resource next week in my article about approaching candidates and former colleagues on LinkedIN.
4. Dust off that rolodex
My biggest competitor as a contingency based search firm is not other companies in my industry, or a companies internal HR team; my biggest competitor is the hiring managers personal and professional network. Senior managers of technology that have been in the industry for decades typically know several dozen well qualified engineers, and often times they know these folks on a personal level. Whether it’s a best friend or an acquaintance in your bowling league, everyone is a potential solution to your hiring problem. One of the questions I always ask before I engage is “do you already have someone in mind from your professional network?”. The most oft answer I hear is “unfortunately none of my contacts are currently looking, they all have jobs.” It’s easy to assume that your buddies and former colleagues are happily employed, because it’s simply not common practice for people to whine and complain to their friends about how much they hate their boss. Things change everyday; someones best friend at work quits, their significant other finds a job in a different county so they have to move closer, or they just plain old decide it’s time. It never hurts to ask and quick e-mail is easy and could net you a great candidate that you already know and feel comfortable with.
This just represents the tip of the iceberg, and in next week’s post I will tackle the how to side of things, specifically with social media and LinkedIN in mind. What do you think about this list? What specific other methods have you used to successfully identify and recruit top notch referral candidates? Let us know in the comments section!
Reader Comments (3)
In my experience, I have found that you have to find the hub developers. The smart, super social connectors that attract like minded engineers and draw them in to open discussions about technology and process. Often times these great Renaissance Architects will jump at the opportunity work with other great developers and great technologies, regardless of the pay.
Exciting Project + Smart People + Great Technologies = Hard charging motivated excited Engineers!
The money is the icing on the cake when you do what you love.
I'm a really big fan of balancing social networking with actual networking in your local community. The value I see is really connecting the blogosphere to something that's real and substantive locally. Nothing can ever replace the value of a face to face interaction. The main thing is that you need to get yourself out there, you're not only promoting your position but your company's brand and vision. Referrals will start coming to you if you do this consistently - even if you're not hiring.
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