Work vacancy is such a sweet dessert that a lot of individuals wish to get, especially with the aftermath of the recession wherein a lot of people have been laid off from work. The dilemma for companies when looking for a person to join their team on an immediate basis is how to get the best job candidate in with a short period of evaluation. More often, staffing managers rely on informal referral programs that are not intended to provide results for emergency placement.

The problem with the usual recommendation methods is that the receipt of referrals are merely obliged and not thoroughly researched. What hiring teams should do is to have a more advanced hiring process in the form of active employee referral sessions. An active employee referral session is a program utilized by best-practice firms that employ almost 60% or more of external hires they receive through recommendations.

So what’s valuable about these proactive referrals? It is their ability to obtain immediate hiring results. What happens with an active referral session is that a staffing manager or recruiter engages a group of target employees in an exercise to record candidates they know that are best suited to a particular job vacancy. Instead of asking who they know, the hiring manager should inquire employees about the following:

• Who they have previously worked with or met that work in a type of position at ABC Establishment or XYZ Corporation (All companies mentioned must have already recognized candidates provided by the hiring manager or recruiter)

• In reference to the establishment they’ve worked with before, they should provide who is thought to be the ideal person when it comes to job skill ‘A’ or job skill ‘B”.
• Out of all the people they have worked with in the past, who do they think can easily adapt to your company’s working environment.

The example questions mentioned above are known to be ‘priming questions’ for they assist the workers in performing an exercise that allows them to recall individuals they would not normally remember in detail if asked about them. Once recruiters and staffing directors manage to prepare at least 5-7 priming questions, they can often haul out lots of information from a staff group to seal the search for a much needed candidate. Having all of the essential info, the hiring committee can verify them and then cooperate with the staff that offered the leads to get close to the target candidate and turn them into a valid and sound recommendation.
Once the company is ready to promptly track the prospect through this procedure, using active employee referral sessions can often result in a hire within 1-2 weeks of the sessions. If organized properly, these active referrals sessions can be the best scouting method any business establishment can make employ.