[From Ongig.com]

According to ERE.net roughly 30% of all hires come through a referral. A referral pipeline can be easier to build in the early and mid-stages of a company’s growth. People are attracted by the opportunity to get in early and have an impact.

As your company grows, the referral pipeline can be more difficult to maintain. The opportunity may not stand out as much with your target audience. The company has likely been seen and evaluated by many in the referral audience.

Recruiting departments are increasingly looking to the social graph of their company as a way to keep momentum in building a referral pipeline. A key in this effort is getting employees to share content across their social networks. Most organizations struggle to get the majority of their employees to share their jobs. The key in raising that rate is to give your team content worth sharing.

Growing businesses, like Zaarly, often find their best hires through referrals.

As documented in Social Recruiting Report, your employees are your best social recruiters. This concept was inspired by Trulia’s Daniel Morris. He assembled a “buzz team” at the company to promote more referrals via social networks.

The “buzz team” shared company and job content across networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and Tumblr. This doubled their referral pipeline, and they were able to hire key players to meet the objective of a successful IPO.

Our findings on the impact of a Facebook Like inspired us to go deeper

Ongig looked closely at the data behind a Facebook like in an October article.  What did we find? A Facebook like brings an average of 4.3 visitors to the job description.

The feedback we received on the Facebook data was very positive. Thus, we decided to take a closer look at the data behind Twitter.

We’ve known that Twitter is the number two overall source of social traffic to Ongig’s job descriptions. This was a good opportunity to evaluate the overall scope and quality of tweets to job descriptions.

What is the value of a tweet on a job description?

The primary number to compare with Facebook Likes was the amount of visitors per tweet coming to the job descriptions. Our data, based on over 130 job descriptions shows that on average 3.6 people visit a job description from each tweet.

While this is slightly lower in volume than a Facebook Like, 3.6 visitors per tweet should incentivize employers to create social job descriptions, and have as many of their employees share them via Twitter as possible. Our data shows this as a solid method for promoting featured job openings.

Let’s break the data down even further. The average job description on Ongig is being tweeted 4 times. If an employer knew they were going to get 3.6 people viewing the job for each tweet, they would likely organize better content and twitter campaigns with more frequency. Think about it, a team of ten people tweeting a job will likely get a minimum of 36 viewers looking at a job. That alone can help jumpstart your referral pipeline.

Going even deeper, Ongig’s social job descriptions are seeing 16 total visitors come from Twitter. This result is being achieved simply by creating great job content, and getting people on the team to share it. There is potential to drive the number much higher in a coordinated campaign, like the mini-case study for Salesforce.com highlighted below.

The average time spent across all of our job descriptions for traffic coming from Twitter is 1:45. This is time saved for your recruiting team in selling a job to someone, or for the candidate in trying to decipher a text-based job description. More thoughtful decisions can be made when a candidate has quality content in front of them.

It’s hard to find job descriptions getting this level of viewership and sharing on the internet.

A Mini-Case Study With The Most Innovative Company In The World

Forbes named Salesforce.com the most innovative company in the world, so it should be no surprise they are on the cutting edge for hiring.

The company understands the need to utilize top marketing techniques in engaging top candidates via social channels. The company built social job descriptions with visuals, social sharing, and real-time commenting.

Once their awesome content was in place, the team at Salesforce.com went to work sharing the job content across Twitter:

The Outliers

There are two jobs that stand out in our Twitter results. We removed these two jobs from our overall results to achieve a median average. However, we wanted to share the results for these outliers as an example of what is possible with a Twitter campaign on jobs:

Salesforce.com – Community Manager (Heavily engaged audience with time on page):

• Tweets: 195
• Visits Per Tweet: 6.3
• Total Visitors From Twitter: 1,230
• Time On Page: 5:42

Twitter – Software Engineer (Impressive amount of views per tweet):

• Tweets: 54
• Visits Per Tweet: 36.6
• Total Visitors From Twitter: 1,979
• Time On Page: 2:01

Bottom Line

The bottom line is that an employer can build their referral pipeline by combining a Twitter campaign with awesome job descriptions.

Twitter is often viewed as nebulous in the world of recruiting. You just don’t know what kind of results you are going to get. However, If you believe you can dozens of people looking at your hottest jobs, and at minimal cost, it can look a lot more interesting.

The key is making sure that you have fun and engaging content that your team will be excited to share.