Employee Referral Programs – Fill Your Hiring Needs

According to Dr. John Sullivan, an expert on employee referral programs andd HR thought leader from Silicon Valley:

“Employee referral programs are the most powerful corporate recruiting tool, bar none. They can produce a high volume of quality hires who have been statistically proven to have lower rates of attrition.  When designed well, they can not only be cost-effective, but they can produce one of the highest ROIs in the entire HR function.”

Dr. Sullivan has advised large companies all over the world and has found several things that are important do to make your referral program as successful as possible:

·       It must be responsive and provide feedback to the preferred candidate within one - three days of the referral and to the referring employee just as quickly.

·       It needs to be given preferential treatment in the timeliness initial contact, phone screening, interview, and the decision about hiring the employee.

·       It needs to target hard-to-fill positions that are essential to the organization.

·       It needs to include all employees to make referrals, regardless of the position they hold.

·       The most important factor in employee referrals is swift candidate evaluation and decision feedback to the referring employee

Great referral programs become part of your company’s culture and some ways to hep make them successful are:

·       Interview referring employees to determine how they met the employee they referred

·       Ask for referrals at all employee onboarding meetings

·       Give current employees referral cards to pass out when they meet a well-qualified potential employee

·       Provide training about how to build their online and offline social networks and use them to recruit superior candidates for your company

·       Where possible have dedicated staffs to deal with the program

·       Provide non-monetary incentives such as public recognition, periodic banquets or lunch with the president to honor employees

·       Develop easy ways for employees to track the status of their referrals

·       Give positive feedback in performance development planning 

·       Provide daily feedback and recognition to those who refer qualified candidates.

·       Let referring employees know what’s happening with their referral every step of the way.

  

Referral programs don’t always have to have monetary rewards, cash is not always the answer. All employees have different motivators.  Determine what they are and use those as inducements.  If you are trying to make your referral program positive, immediate and certain, don’t issue awards that only pay the referring employee all or part of it after the new employee works out successfully for six months or a year.  That becomes de-motivational and takes the energy out of the program.  

Employee involvement is key to an effective employee referral selection process.  The more you do to get it, the better your program will be.

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net

Compare Open & Closed Loop Reward & Recognition Cards

Companies purchasing gift cards for recognition, loyalty, and goal achievement often debate the advantages of purchasing and awarding open loop cards vs. closed loop gift cards.

Open loop payment cards are prepaid cards carrying the MasterCard, American Express, Discover, or Visa logo. These cards may be used like cash wherever credit cards are accepted.

Closed loop payment cards are those limited to a specific vendor and can only be spent at the merchant listed on the card.  Starbucks and Amazon gift cards, for example, are “closed” because they are only accepted at those specific merchants. 

At first glance, it appears that open loop cards are the best solution as they offer the widest range of purchasing options.  But before you make that decision, consider these attributes:

• Often impose a per card fee above the face value – can be as much as $5.95 per card.  On smaller denominated ($25 or $50) this can amount to 10% to 12% additional cost.
• Often expire and/or decline in value after 6 or 12 months if full balance is not used;
• Often impose fees when the card is swiped, when you check your balance via customer service, and other situations included in the “fine print” on the card;
• Often result in a decline at the merchant location if cardholder does not know the exact balance and the merchant cannot tell the cardholder how much remains on the card;
• Can be confusing at checkout if the cardholder wants to use an additional method of payment for any outstanding balance on his/her purchase (i.e. a “split tender” transaction).
• In addition, older credit card processing terminals still handle gift cards as though they are credit cards – putting holds (or pre-authorization amounts) on the gift cards when they are first swiped. If the bank card does not have a balance to accommodate a pre-authorization swipe plus the final sale, a gift card might be declined.
• Closed loop merchant cards, while restricting the cardholder to a specific merchant, have no declining values and rarely impose expiration dates. In addition, the merchant can “read” the card and tell the cardholder the exact balance that remains.  

The user experience is usually much smoother with closed loop cards than with open loop.

How about a solution that offers the best of both worlds? Award of Choice gives each recipient the open loop flexibility of hundreds of merchants with the ease of closed loop gift card use. One Award of Choice opens the door to over 500 closed loop gift card brands including those that are requested most – WalMart, Target, Amazon, Starbucks, Best Buy, Costco, etc.  With no fees, no expirations, and no minimums, Award of Choice combines the best of closed loop and open loop cards -- offering hundreds of merchant choices, favorable economics, and a great user experience.

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net

Reward Items of No Value Get Thrown Away

This Delbert cartoon Adams raises a very appropriate discussion regarding employee recognition awards.  It is a debate that has been going on for years and years, and no doubt will continue for years and years.   

Why?  Because if you were to draw a straight line continuum to depict the awards industry, advertising specialty items would be on one end of the spectrum and strategic full service employee incentive and recognition programs that included research, training, communications, feedback, awards and analysis would be at the other.

The debate arises anywhere along that line where the advertising specialist sales folks think they carry the type of products that are appropriate as awards.  And they could be right, some of their items could be appropriate.  But unfortunately most don’t, and actually if you prefer to give your award winner a choice of what they can receive, many would choose another award.  But often clients don’t really want to give a choice.  They’ve chosen the item because it fits their need to communicate something; the theme, the company, the outcomes, the goals etc. 

So, when considering awards for your incentive or recognition program, think about this cartoon.  Will the items you choose eventually be thrown away and considered as something with little or no value?  Will they be relegated to the bottom desk drawer or the closet?  What are you trying to accomplish; motivate increased performance or simply communicate something. 

When your award backfires and your employees see relatively little value in it, it can do more harm than good.  Remember, the award categories termed advertising specialties do just that.  They advertise something. 

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net

To Retain Your Best Employees – Train Your Managers

Research from just three years ago showed that:

 “half of employees who don't feel valued by their employer intend to look for a new job in the next year. Among those who feel valued, just 1 in 5 (21%) will send their resumes elsewhere.”

With labor market shrinking as it is today, that % may double.  While you are doing everything to find and hire new workers, you also need to do what’s necessary to retain your current ones.

Lots of studies show that employee recognition is one of the factors that will keep your employees from job hunting.  The first factor of course is pay and benefits, but when you reached the plateau on those and there’s not much more give in those budgets, you need to look at other ways to get things done.  Monetary compensation is not the only reason employees stay with a company.

Behavioral psychologists know that you appeal to a workers' sense of value when you reinforce their performance with positive consequences.  Employees that feel valued at work, tend to stay at work with that company. If it’s that easy, why do we constantly work with clients who are having problems with their current recognition efforts?  Could it be a simple matter of management training? 

According to David Ballard, PsyD, an assistant director of organizational excellence at the APA:

"Most managers and supervisors are never really trained to give effective recognition, and don't track the effectiveness of programs that they have in place.”  Managers need to be trained "in the basics of recognition and reward theory to make sure that recognition is closely tied to the behavior that they're trying to recognize and encourage."

No single reward strategy will appeal to all your employees.  Everyone has a unique way that they like to be recognized.  And the front line manager is the best suited to bring that recognition to the employee, to know what they want.  Once they know what their employee’s value, if they make it a priority to implement a reward system that addresses that value, you will get more of that type of performance. 

And, while you’re at it, you may want to institute a recognition system to reward those managers who are going the great job of recognizing their people. 

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net

Employee Turnover and How to Win The War

According to a recent Forbes report the labor market is shrinking. There is already competition for top talent, and it appears this economic cycle will be here for a while:

“The headline report adds new jobs and subtracts quits, layoffs, retirements and other separations. The gross rate at which people are quitting is now three million people per month, twice what it was in the recession. And companies are trying to hire, both to replace quits and retirements and also to expand. Six million open positions show up in the official reports, and businesses would certainly hire even more if people were available. But this recent economic growth is not the whole story. The tight job market will continue for a decade or more.”

The impact is crippling for many employers. Josh Bersin estimates the total cost of losing an employee – which includes such factors as lost productivity, knowledge drain, and company morale – at a stunning 1.5 to 2.0 times the employee’s annual salary.

In addition, there is a longer hiring cycle.  At an average 27.6 business days per position, the lag time between posting new jobs and getting them filled is already well above pre-recession levels and approaching its highest mark since the turn of the century.

This new trend in unemployment will necessitate some new strategies including: 

Reassess your total compensation package — but not all compensation comes in the form of cash. Employee discount programs and other perks like flexible work hours can be inexpensive, and retooled recognition programs are yet effective ways to boost your overall benefits package.

Invest in people -- Job skills training, for example, not only pays off in overall productivity – lessening the need for additional FTEs – but individuals with career development opportunities report higher levels of overall job satisfaction. Supervisory training is a similarly critical piece of the puzzle, as more than half of U.S. workers have reported quitting a job to escape a bad manager.

Leverage technology to expand productivity -  computing power and technical innovation has led to an explosion of targeted, low-cost productivity apps for virtually every department within an organization.

Tap into global sources of labor - reach out to staffing organizations that specialize in international outsourcing. You may discover opportunities to test (even temporarily) the skills and quality of global talent for various positions at a relatively low cost.

Tap the power of your own employees – now is the time to implement an employee referral program that awards your employees for introducing a family member, friend or acquaintance to work for your company. 

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net