Jamey Jeff

Referral recruiting sounds like a great idea: you’re looking to fill a new position, and where better to start looking for folks than through people you already know?  The referrers can be employees at the hiring company, or simply people in the network of the recruiter or hiring manager.

In my experience, the outcome of referral recruiting can vary significantly based on the source, and their incentives for making the referral.

Starting with the ideal case, a hiring manager brings on someone with whom they’ve worked in the past.  Often, these moves materialize as part of the “hidden” job market; no open position is ever posted, no resume changes hands, no position is formally “applied” for.  The manager simply picks up the phone and “gets the band back together” by assembling top talent they’ve worked with in previous lives.  While there are lots of reasons where this sort of move might not work out in the end, one factor that heavily favors a positive outcome is that the manager and recruit have worked with each other previously and choose to do so again, with the insight of knowing what they are getting into. 

It is this ideal that forms the motivation for any sort of referral recruiting.  There is a belief that since “A players tend to work with other A players”, that if I ask my employees (who are all A players, right?) or talented people in my network to recommend people for open positions, that the people whom they refer will naturally be talented as well.

Is this belief correct?  Well…it depends.  I was interviewing a seasoned recruiter recently, and asked him about A player referrals.  His response, loosely paraphrased, was, “Do A players know other A players?  Of course they do, but those other A players all currently have jobs and most aren’t looking for a new one.  The problem is that A players also know their unemployed drinking buddy, or their just-laid-off college roommate… and more often than not, the A player you are talking to is more interested in helping their friend than they are in helping you connect with the most talented folks in their network.”

So where’s the gold in the gap between the idealized model for referral recruiting and the unemployed drinking buddy?  It’s in the incentives or, more accurately, the potential for shared pain/opportunity.  By this I don’t mean direct financial incentives, as in many employee referral programs that pay for a successful hire.  I mean how much is your own professional success influenced by the placement of this candidate? For those 1-degree of separation positions (manager, peer, subordinate), no A player would refer anyone but the best, because they realize that their own career trajectory (and reputation) will be heavily influenced by any names they throw in the hat.

Recognize this, and apply it when considering referral recruiting.  Targeting referrals from not just the most talented individuals, but those with the greatest incentives to provide access to the best talent in their networks, will greatly increase the likelihood of getting the desired inbound flow of A players.

With the rise of social media, we began to publicly share and show more things about us.  We show where we are, we show what we see, we show what we like, and who we work with.

These have all been great advances for human connectedness and for the flow of information, but until recently, the power to share for the benefit of finding the right job or candidate hadn’t begun to emerge.

The earliest innovations in recruiting technology were, for the most part, digitizing an analog process.  Systems were created to electronically post jobs and deliver resumes.  But the essence of the process, and its limitations remained.  Resumes remain a flawed representation of a candidate.  As a best case, they are like watching a professionally produced highlight real, with successes glorified and polished, and shortcomings excluded.  The real tragedy though is the case where highly qualified candidates simply aren’t highly qualified resume writers and end up slipping through the cracks.

For several years now, we’ve seen the emergence of social recruiting technologies.  These advances though, like those before them, are not fully transformative, but rather just leverage the platform advances of the day.  As Facebook and Twitter have risen, so have products allowing candidates and recruiters to connect with each other through these platforms.  But still, the fundamental constructs of the process persist.

That’s now beginning to change though.  Better ways to find and evaluate talent are emerging.  For the candidate, there are a growing number of platforms that allow individuals to demonstrate their knowledge and skills, rather than just claim expertise on a resume.  Today’s sites allow contributors to develop a reputation, earn skill-related badges, complete online assessments, and follow & rate peers are providing the underpinnings for a much more robust means for individuals to showcase their know-how.  Recruiters and hiring managers benefit by having a much more objective view into talent than what can be conveyed in a resume. At Remarkable Hire, we refer to this as “social evidence”, and believe that this is a truly transformative advancement for the recruiting industry.

2.5 months into Remarkable Hire, the value of Eric Ries’ lean startup principles are clear.  Getting out of the office and meeting with as many potential customers as possible has greatly accelerated our learning and the development of our business, while investing development cycles only where essential. 

I’ve been running with the customer development activities, putting paper and pdf versions of our product in front of our customers, manually running the “algorithm” to source candidates for their hiring needs, and doing a lot of listening.  The amount we’ve learned from this approach has been immeasurable.  Most importantly, it’s a lot easier to iterate a Microsoft Word version of our UI than it would be to be changing code at this stage. 

It’s also allowed Scott to focus his development efforts where learning by writing the code is the most efficient means (ie the backend candidate identification system…the “secret sauce”, so I won’t elaborate).  By dividing our efforts in this way, I can continue to learn and iterate on the customer problem side without distracting Scott’s focus on separate product solution matters. 

As we rapidly approach our planned private alpha test, we do so with much more confidence that the UI that we initial test with will be much closer to what our customers need than it would have been had we not followed lean principles.

Now a couple months in to the new gig, Scott and I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the ways that people find talent and how to improve and simplify the process.  It’s still much too manual, time consuming, and inefficient.  Are resumes really the best way to evaluate a candidate, or are they just a cat and mouse game of cramming the right keywords into a Word document?  Do the best candidates spend time on job boards or polishing their LinkedIn profile?  We don’t think so.

We do believe however that the ever-growing amount of content and data and contributions that individuals post online provide a signal.  Much of this content is created in the act of doing one’s day job, and hence provides a better indicator for someone’s talent, interests, and professional network.  Known by some as the “reputation graph”, this compilation of what everyone who knows or interacts with you thinks of you is getting increased attention as a means to evaluate individuals.  Business Insider recently suggested that this digital value could eventually outweigh the value of your financial assets.  This is perhaps a bit extreme, but it does articulate the current opportunity from a talent identification perspective.