The Value Of Viral Recruitment & Candidate Experience

Learn what dancing dog videos can teach you about delivering a powerful candidate experience – and how it can work magic on your referral program.

There’s this myth about going viral. We dream of this secret formula that makes the internet fall in love with us – a touch of humor here, a strum of heartstrings there, a dash of topical relevance. Then you spring a well of visitors on your website, make a billion dollars and call it a day. Right?

Back to reality. The thing is, “going viral” does have its component parts. But you often only see how/why they worked in retrospect. Why? At the core of that formula are two tricky things – humans and timing.

And anything that goes viral must get those two things just right.

Don’t Count Your Connections, Make Them Count.

What’s wrong with going viral, however, isn’t the improbability of it. For many businesses, it doesn’t make sense. Maximum audience doesn’t mean max ROI. The right audience does.

What makes more sense, particularly in staffing, is connecting with the right people – and making that connection count. Yet, at its purest, that’s exactly what virality is all about: human connection and the desire to share an experience.

We share videos of dancing dogs because we want others to get the same joy out of watching dancing dogs as we did. We also crave the satisfaction of giving that gift of joy, which can imbue us with a sense of power or, in fact, more joy. And there’s your secret formula.

What’s the Power of Shared Experience?

Technology has done nothing short of change the way we do life (not to mention staffing) over the past… well, what feels like every 30-45 seconds. At the same pace that technology, like automation and AI, replaces one human interaction or another, it also has a way of bringing us together. Like with viral dancing dog videos.

But no matter what we automate or machine-learn away, technology will should never supplant the essential mission of our industry – people connecting people to meaningful work.

Which is exactly where tech comes in. Automation and AI aren’t at their best in staffing when they’re replacing humans. The smartest solutions create time and space for powerful human experiences. Automate the fluff and standards. Dig into the good stuff.

Let your candidates tell you what they need. Use technology to make their lives easier and to give you more time to listen. Combine data and real, human interactions to optimize candidate engagement and deliver a better candidate experience next time (and the time after that).

QUIZ: Does your recruiting referral program mean business? Take this quick quiz to evaluate how referrals are helping you today — and see how to put them to work for real ROI.

What You Want To End Up With Is Dancing Dogs.

When you let your candidates drive the experience you deliver, you create something worth sharing. They just had an awesome experience with someone who cares. They’re going to talk about it. And there’s your secret formula, again.

Candidates refer qualified friends to recruiters for many reasons. Money is one. Plenty of people enjoy the satisfaction of giving the gift of a job (referred applicants are 15x more likely to be hired). More, still, refer friends because they want to share the experience. That’s how recruiting turns viral.

Using the right tech here – to empower satisfied candidates to share that experience, easily, with their networks – not only gives you, the recruiter, the gift of network effects. It gives that candidate the power to be a microrecruiter and to feel the satisfaction of people connecting people to meaningful work.

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