The performance gap between the very best employee referral programs and the typical program is growing dramatically wider each day. Benchmark organizations dedicating resources and formally managing their programs are very close to producing 50% or more of all external hires from their programs — nearly double that of the …

40 Practices That Distinguish Great from Average The following list is separated into eight categories, based on what the composite practices are trying to accomplish. Benchmark firms are highlighted in parentheses. Improving the Business Case for ERPs The best referral programs are well-funded because they have convinced business leaders and …

The three basic FPI approaches include: Evaluating the steps in the recruiting process — in order to find failure points, locate the deluded individual step to determine if it is even being carried out, who is accountable for it, and whether there are  metrics for assessing the output of that …

Benchmark Pass-through Rates At Each Step I recommend that you begin the failure point identification process by calculating the average “pass” or pass-through rate at each step in your process. You can start with benchmark data from other firms. For example, the following data covers over 130,000 applications from nine …

The 19 Steps in an Effective Recruiting Process In this section I’ll list each of the 19 distinct steps in the recruiting process, as well as the primary goal and the common cause of failure for each. Step #1 — Determine your ideal recruiting target — the goal of this …

Award Winner — Ernst & Young As a global leader in accounting and advisory services, Ernst & Young has a long history of excelling in many aspects of talent management. Its efforts with regard to employer branding are no exception. E&Y’s brand focuses on telling a robust story about how …

As with all ere.net posts, you are encouraged to share your thoughts on the practices described, ask follow up questions, and suggest additional practices that elevate the game following each installment. Best Practices in Employee Referral Programs I have long argued that employee referral programs should be the foundation of …

A reporter from the Wall Street Journal once asked me what I thought was the greatest secret in recruiting.  Such a broad question would usually cause one to ponder, but my immediate response was that abusive hiring processes cost organizations millions of dollars by turning possible customers into lifelong “haters.” …

The most powerful recruiting advertisement I’ve seen in the last two years didn’t originate from Google and it wasn’t found on a social media site; instead it was a “take your breath away” billboard designed to attract a single person. Usually billboards are a complete waste of money, but this …

Spock of Star Trek fame was famous for pointing out things that were completely illogical, which leads me to believe he would have had a field day examining corporate recruiting practices. Of all the things that we do in corporate recruiting that are difficult to logically justify, my vote for …