Quick Study (2): Employee Feedback on Referrals

A couple weeks ago in a blog post entitled Quick Study Finds 3 Reasons Employees Don’t Refer, I highlighted the reasons employees gave for why they were reluctant to provide referrals. I mentioned in that post that I would share some of the other results as well. So here you go:

First some quick data points:

• 170 employees were asked to participate in a new referral program
• 24% agreed to participate (41 employees)
• 6 jobs were posted – ranging from a help desk position to marketing to very technical
• 44 names were referred during the 5 week test
• Number of referrals per job ranged from a low of 4 to a high of 13
• The most referrals was for a marketing position, the least was for an HR position (go figure!)

When employees from the tests were interviewed, here was some of the key feedback:

• It’s Personal: Referrals are so personal. I had a hard time referring people unless I knew both the company and the person I was referring really fit perfectly, even though I knew that some people I rejected might have been OK.
• It’s a Noisy World: Even though this new tool was very easy to use and minimized my time, I am still just too distracted with so many other things during the day.
• What’s It All About: Our Company seems to hype referrals a couple times a year. A quick email and a mention at the company meeting just isn't enough to get my attention.
• Incentives Get Attention: The odds that I will ever see that $1,000 referral bonus seem remote (I don’t play Lotto) can there be other incentives for me to spend time on this?
• It’s My Network: I am reluctant to send too many referrals onto HR. What are they doing with the names? Will they spam my friends? This is my network of friends – leave them alone!
• Is Anybody There: I hate sending on a name and never hearing anything back. It’s just rude and turns me off!

And the last main bit of feedback:

• I Wouldn't Wish This on My Best Friend: It is all about the strength of the culture. I like working here, but I am not sure I would recommend this place to someone else. It’s a job, but nothing to brag about.

What are your thoughts about these results? Do you experience some of this in your referral programs? 

Quick Study Finds 3 Reasons Employees Won’t Refer

We recently conducted an experiment with 178 employees to find out how they would react to a new employee referral program. 42 signed up. That is 23.6%. Not bad, but also not anywhere good enough. I wanted to know why more did not participate.

Before we started this experiment we did a little researching of our own to find out what to expect. How many employees usually participate in referral programs? I had a hard time finding a study that focused specifically on that, but the number seems rather small. Less than 10% seems to be a common number I hear. (If you know of a study that provides good data about this – please send me the link)

That means if you have a company of 250 great employees that you would love to clone, you only get about 20 to 25 of them that ever pass on names for you to consider. Why is that?

After running our test for 3 weeks I interviewed a subset of the employees that participated in the referral program and a subset that did not. The responses were interesting and I will write about some more of them in future blogs, but here are the top three reasons employees did not want to participate in referrals:

1. Email Noise: This one surprised me (though maybe it should not have). An overwhelming number of the participants in both groups interviewed said they barely read emails that aren’t critical to the task at hand. Emails from HR or “corporate” get perused, but unless it really affects them right now, today, they put it aside. It is not that they have anything against participating in a referral program; they just didn’t slow down enough to read the email.
2. Fear of Failure Effect: Employees don’t want to be associated with a bad referral. They even stated in our conversation that they realized referrals usually resulted in better employees, but they were unwilling to pass along any name that might not be seen as a great referral.
3. Refer vs. Recommend (or just passing along a name): This reason was related to the Fear of Failure reason above but was different in a very important way. They did no trust that HR would still put a referral through the same kind of scrutiny they would a non-referred candidate. The employees said they knew a lot of people, but that was not the same thing as knowing whether they would fit in as employees. They were happy to pass on the name, but were not comfortable saying the person was a guaranteed good fit.

What's your experience with referrals? If you have any information on employee participation in referrals that you're willing to share,  I’d love to hear about it.

Finding work at 60: Is HR Failing a Generation?

Upper middle-management and out of a job.

Too qualified,

Too set in your ways

Not right for the job

Too old fashion for our hip new company

And too many other things you aren't allowed to say.

How many really talented people are out there looking (and looking) for work who can’t find a job because the 30 (or 40) something that is in charge of hiring has a pre-conceived notion that the person they are looking for is “younger.” How many automated resume screening tools see someone who was highly successful for 30 years as not qualified for the new product manager position that just opened up? 

I am closing in on that generation. I know a lot of people who are there (guess when you've been around a long time, a lot of the people you know seem to have aged on you). My brother is 59 and just got laid off from a career of 25 years as a successful disc jockey. Seems they don’t need disc jockeys much anymore and really don’t need old ones. He’s applied to sell cars, drive trucks, work at most anything that a 20-something might apply for. Nothing, Nada, No reply.

I just got off the phone this morning with an old (sorry for the use of that word) friend of mine who was a very successful business man. Built a company from scratch and made himself and a lot of other people a lot of money when he sold it. He doesn’t need a lot of money now, but he wants the stimulation of work. For 4 years now: Nothing, Nada, No reply.

Seems to me that we have a lot of talent out there that current hiring (and recruiting) processes don’t know how to deal with. The Great Recession put a lot of talent on the street, but the great boom in new business processes leaves them out of the picture.

That’s a shame: A generation lost. 

Give A Con A Break

The City of San Francisco was one of the first to take up a measure to ban the use of criminal histories as part of the pre-employment process. Several other government jurisdictions are considering similar legislation. This trend is born of the idea that criminal histories may be racist (because minorities tend to be convicted at a higher rate than non-minorities) and that it exacerbates the unemployment problem – especially among those with criminal records.

But for me the more interesting question (and more difficult challenge) is how do we truly assess that risk and make smart hiring decisions about people with previous legal or drug problems. Should they all be damned forever and a day? Story ended. That would be the easy way to handle the problem. No need to worry about complex hiring procedures or concerns that people won’t follow the exact dictates of the company. We hire no one with a previous conviction or a previous problem with drugs. Period!

We’re better than that.

A previous conviction does not have to be a permanent sentence of unemployment. The real solution to the problem is that criminal history alone should not be the only reason for rejecting a candidate. Yes – I understand (I used to be in the background checking business after all) that there are very real circumstance that mean zero tolerance (access to vulnerable populations like children or elderly for example) where the risk is just too great. But that is what I mean when I say that a criminal history record alone should not decide the hire/no hire choice. A criminal history record PLUS a high sensitive position – should mean no hire. Other situations such as repeat offenders, people with a pattern of multiple problems, a conviction along with lying on your resume might all be reasons for rejecting a candidate.

Patterns and context should dictate hiring risk – not just single data points.

It's people we are dealing with and people can make mistakes and still move beyond them. This is where our professionalism as recruiters and human resource people comes in. We use data to help make decisions – we don’t let data make the decisions for us.

An Ode to SEO for Recruiters

If I were to SEO

What would be the way to go?

Would I blog or would I write

A mighty pen to make me bright?

Key word phrases all strung out

Makes my writing all flung out.

Search for hires

High and low

Better with my SEO

20 key words and long tails to sell

If I try and say them all,

will you promise not to tell?

My marketing Director does insist

That all my writing should consist

Of random words

Thrown to and fro

Just so Google loves me so.

And then there’s Mack

I love her too

She’s our queen of SEO

But write a word that sounds just right

And suffer wrath at all her might

So homage to the SEO

Throw those words in, watch them flow.

Add some funky phrases too

Let them know that hiring is what we do.

Have some job postings

And offer up a referral or two.

Get alumni in the game

Contact everyone fit or lame.

Company name, best hires too

JAVA, Lava, and Code Blue

I’ll get those words in as I can

And hope you understand my plan.

So if what I say seems out of sorts

Trust my words to the Google courts

Yoga for Stressed Out Recruiters

Recruiting can be stressful. You try so hard to find the perfect candidate and sometimes it seems like all the stars are aligned against you. To help with this problem, I have come up with some yoga poses to be used for some of those more stressful moments.

Down Dog: This pose is used when that candidate you had high hopes for totally pisses-off the President of the company by saying something really stupid. The pose is to be executed at the end of the day when you are debriefing the candidate and he says “So how did I do?”

To perform this pose, you should lay down on the floor with your feet facing toward the candidate. Slowly walk your hands toward your feet until your butt is facing high in the air and say: “Take a guess.”

Angry Cat: In this situation, you have found the perfect candidate for a position and all the interviewers loved the person. At the last minute when you are about to make the offer, the department head says they want to interview them too and asks that you arrange for the candidate to come back next week.

With this pose, you climb up on the manager’s table and with your face about 3 inches from his nose, you arch your back and hiss really loudly while you spit out the words “Why didn't you say you wanted to be involved in the interview when I asked you last week!”

Warrior Pose: This pose is best used when you are trying to round up a group of people to interview a candidate and no one will get back to you. The candidate has called and let you know that she has another offer but would really like to work for your company and has to get back to the other company by the end of the week.

This pose is most effective when you execute it in the lunch room where most of the people you are trying to contact have gathered. You stand up on one of the tables and spread your legs far apart while lifting your arms to be even with your shoulders. You look fiercely over your right arm and shout: “Everyone out the door this minute and do not come back until you have signed up for tomorrow’s interview.” If they don’t move fast enough, start throwing food at them.

Corpse Pose: Ideal for end of the year goal reviews, the time for this pose comes when you have spent your year fighting all the obstacles put in your way that prevent you from finding and hiring the best people. The Director of HR calls you into his office and hands you a piece of paper with a bunch of graphs. He explains politely (he is in HR after all) that the graphs and charts clearly show that you missed your goals for time to hire.

To execute this pose, you calmly lay on the ground with your arms to your side and your feet slightly splayed. You don’t really need to say anything – he will get the point.

Hero Pose: This pose is reserved just for you. After you have busted your “back side” trying to find the best people possible you step back and look at all the good people you were responsible for and allow yourself a minute of self congratulations.

To execute this pose, you turn on some highly inspirational music (like the theme from Chariots of Fire). You lower yourself to the ground with your legs bent to the sides so that you create a firm base. You raise your hands in the air and scream out "I Rock.” Note – this is best done while wearing a superman T-shirt.

Happy recruiting and may you find your inner peace.