"Does anyone know a good developer? We are offering a $3,000 bonus to you if you refer a friend and that friend is hired," my boss explained. I was working at an agency at the time. Agencies are a great place to work! New projects every few months, challenging work all the time, and energetic coworkers that liven things up. As our developers and designers started leaving to join Adobe and other large software companies we needed to fill their spots with some top-notch developers.
Co-workers all around me started referring friends, but I never knew who to refer. Sure I knew people, but they were busy with their start-ups or working for some other firms and loving it. I couldn't think of anyone who was looking for a job that was a good fit, and this is the exact problem facing most employees today who are asked to refer a friend.
The Beginning
While working for the agency a few friends and I started talking about the problem my work was having with finding good people. We decided that we could help companies find the right people. Wait, we could go one step further, we could help those people, who like me, are willing to refer but can not think of anyone.
We built a simple product and invited some beta customers back in January of 2011. Taking feedback we tried to improve the product and make it really shine for the employee in two ways:
- Keep all the current referral program functionality while adding on the powerful ranking and suggestion engine.
- Create a simple and easy to use interface so that referrals become quick and not cumbersome.
Today
We have a really polished employee referral process. We have improved the experience of recruiters and hiring managers. We are releasing updated analytics for recruiters as well as a new look. We hope that we can help drive even higher participation through our new recruiter analytics.
There are more features and best practices that go into our product and a great employee referral program, but here's what I feel are the most important benefits that we bring to the table:
- Giving employees help finding qualified friends and connections.
- Making it simple to refer, invite, and communicate.
- Helping the recruiters see program progress and take actionable steps to improve their program.
We'd love to show you what we've been working on.
