It’s no secret in recruiting, referrals are a major source of quality hires.  And key to referrals are your employees.  While many organizations understand they need to get their employees better involved in their recruitment marketing process, the question is how to do it.

When getting started, you need to understand a few things.  First, understand what your main goal is.  Not only should this initiative help drive referral candidates but it should also be a major part of your employer branding strategy.  Second, understand that you will not have full control over the process.  There needs to be a certain amount of trust with your employees that you need to have.  So if your organization doesn’t allow social media during work hours, you may want to focus on other initiatives.

So where to begin.  Here are a few places I would start:

Create and Educate on Corporate Policy:  First things first when getting your employees involved you need to have a set policy that employees can follow. The policy needs to set expectations for what employees should and should not share on social & other channels in terms of jobs as well as company communications.  Here is a good article on how to write a social media policy.

Most importantly, you need to educate employees on your policy.  To be truly successful this is more than just a page you distribute with your messaging but a continual education process with all the internal employee communications you distribute.

Publish new content that is compelling & shareable:  After you determine what content you want shared, it’s time to produce more of it.  The first content you can provide employees is your jobs.  Make sure to keep employees apprised of the new job opportunities that are available, how they can submit referrals and most importantly what the benefits are for submitting quality referrals.   Make it a part of your job distribution process.

Second, provide them with great compelling content on your company and make it easy to share for your employees.  And most importantly, make sure your employees know where they can find and read this content.  (You can determine if it’s compelling by tracking what content is shared the most with social media & recruitment metrics.  And produce more of it.)  Best of all, the more employees share, the greater the opportunity they want to get involved with making content.  They are the best resource for creating compelling recruiting stories.

Take a look at Pepsi’s new social policy as a great real world example of providing great content for your employees to share.  As you can see, they do a great job of educating employees on what content is good to share & what’s not.

Encourage them to join social media:  It doesn’t matter how well you do the first two steps, if this third issue isn’t addressed.  Many of your employees already use social media channels but it’s important to communicate that you want them involved in social media.  Encourage them to experiment with different social tools and most importantly, enable them to utilize these channels as part of their every day job activities.  (If you don’t allow social media at work, it may be time to scrap an employee social recruiting policy.)

Getting employees on board to help & share your recruiting content can have some significant benefits.  Not only will it more likely lead to more (& better) referral candidates but it will help provide candidates a deeper look into your organization and what makes your opportunities special.

Let your employees help you shape & spread your Employer Brand.  And most importantly trust them to do so.