LatinOcean - Marketing and Web Technologies Applied to Talent Management

Anecdotal evidence indicates that referrals are a great source of placed/place-able candidates. “Great” is obviously highly subjective, it could refer to a number of variables and scales.

I will forget for a moment that I have not seen systemic/comprehensive empirical of the ‘greatness’ of referrals. Assuming this is a channel worth nurturing and developing, I believe that what enables the message (job opportunity) to disseminate through the channel is a minimum of two Trust relationships:

- 1 between the referrer and referee (colleague, relative)
- 1 between the potential employer or agency (whomever offers the job) and referrer (current employer, family business)

I am not even saying that this trust is well placed, I am only stating it needs to exist so that the message (job opportunity) goes somewhere. Eventually, a third trust relationship – between employer/agency and referee – may develop, even though the candidate is not offered the job.

From this it follows that the core issue with online referral systems like 2vouch and others is the fact that there is no trust relationship between the job poster and the referrer, so there is no comfort in disseminating the message. I would argue that the info on the job posting is not comprehensive enough to compel a referrer to recommend it to a contact.

The accompanying risks are well known: spamming, low quality, lack of ‘greatness’. What follows then is that if I were to run one of these referrals sites, I would dedicate 90% of all my budget to develop at trust relationship between the job poster and the referrer, sneezer, etc.

Do you agree? What else would you do to make an online referral platform actually work, other than the usual (great service, fluid site, blah)?

Have a great week

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Companies, Talent, referrals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.