02.7.2023 Sarah Goodall
When employees are advocates for your company, they’re always happy to speak highly of you. No time is their advocacy more crucial than when it comes to recruiting.
Recruitment costs an average of $4,000 for every new hire. However, that price increases as the level of seniority increases. It also doesn’t include the cost of onboarding, which can take anything from two to eight months depending on the complexity of the role.
Employee advocacy helps you to reduce your time and cost to hire. This means you lose less money to the hiring process and you’re more likely to hire the best person for the role first time.
Employee Referrals
People often network with others who think like them and have similar interests. It therefore makes sense to take advantage of your employees’ networks when hiring. In fact, employee referrals provide the shortest time to hire, according to 24.9% of recruiters. That means you and your employees lose less time to hiring and have more time to focus on higher-value tasks.
Most candidates nowadays are passive. That means that while they’re open to new opportunities, they’re not actively searching on places like job boards. You therefore need to get creative about how you engage with these passive candidates. Utilising your employees’ social media skills to spread the word about your business is a great way to do this
When they share not just about your latest vacancies, but what it’s like to work for your company, it helps to attract the best passive candidates in their network. Employees are seen as 2x more trustworthy than a company CEO, so hearing about what working for you is like, from them, makes it more believable for your future hires. Not only that, but it makes the role more desirable, too.
26% of recruiters also believe that employees hired through referrals are of the best quality. Therefore the more advocates you have, the greater the chance you’ll have of finding the best quality candidate.
Spreading The Word
Positive reviews on sites like Glassdoor or even Facebook also make a huge difference.
More and more candidates are checking company reviews before applying for a role. If any of the ratings or comments make them uncomfortable, they’re less likely to apply.
It’s therefore important that you encourage your employees to leave an honest rating and/or review. Potential candidates can often see when a company has asked employees to leave comments in bulk – things like similar saccharine comments, zero negatives, and everything posted within a few days are big giveaways – so how you ask them to leave reviews is crucial.
Make sure that, while you encourage your employees to leave ratings and reviews, they don’t feel like it’s mandatory. This can lead to them being forced into uncomfortable situations and feeling like they’re unable to be honest about their role. It can then cause them to want to be anything but advocates.
Even if a potential candidate has never heard of your company before, positive comments online could be the difference between them choosing to apply for your role or continuing on their search.
Save Time, Save Money
Employee advocacy is one of the best ways to improve your recruitment process. It shows that you have happy, engaged employees that want to work for you. This positive working environment not only makes your employees more productive, but it also helps you to attract top talent every time.
And, with the war for talent becoming ever more competitive, the more you can do to stand out from your competition, the faster – and cheaper – your hiring process will be.
