A talent community is one of the most important assets a staffing firm can have. When candidates are scarce, this community can help you reach passive job seekers and other talent that other agencies can’t access.
“Right now, there’s a race to build, engage, and leverage talent communities in staffing. One key to winning this race is choosing technology partners that help you operate faster, smarter, and stronger.
Cell Staff and Integrity are perfect examples of agencies well-positioned to win. By using Bullhorn and Staffing Referrals, they have automated many parts of their talent community outreach and engagement so their recruiters can focus on the human aspects.
Agencies that are actively building their community today will create a sustainable competitive advantage.”
~David Folwell, President at Staffing Referrals”
In January at World Staffing Summit, Staffing Referrals President David Folwell and VP of Customer Experience Rachelle Arnold spoke with Alyssa Zaccaria, Director of IT at Integrity Staffing Solutions, and Eric Parker, VP of Talent Management Operations at Cell Staff, about how staffing firms can build and leverage a talent community for a competitive advantage. Both agencies use Bullhorn, which Staffing Referrals has a deep integration with.
This is a summary of their conversation. Watch the whole session here.
Staffing agencies’ top recruiting challenges
#1. Agencies are all fishing from the same pond
One of the ongoing recruiting challenges that agencies face is that they’re fishing from the same pond, i.e., they’re buying the same resumes as their competitors. This frequently happens on job boards like Indeed, where many companies advertise for similar roles. Sometimes, agencies discover that they’re buying the same resumes that their clients are!
It’s very hard to differentiate your services when you’re buying the same talent as your competitors. And often, these candidates aren’t even new.
“We’ve noticed that sometimes we’re fishing in the same pond as ourselves! We’re posting jobs on Indeed or ZipRecruiter, and a lot of times those candidates are already in our database.” ~Eric Parker, VP of Talent Management Operations at Cell Staff
Job boards are expensive – agencies spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on them every year. But the real kicker is that 73% of candidates are passive job seekers, meaning they’re not even looking on job boards. So staffing agencies are spending a huge amount of money, and not actually reaching the vast majority of their target audience.
73% of candidates are passive job seekers
#2. Employers can’t find talent with the skills they need
The difficulty increases when it comes to skilled talent. Today, 77% of employers say that they can’t find high-quality candidates with the skills they need. And the more specialized the skills, the harder it gets.
77% of employers say that they can’t find high-quality candidates
The solution: Building and leveraging a talent community.
A strong, engaged, and constantly expanding talent community is the solution for both of the challenges outlined above.
What is a talent community?
A talent community is a pool of talent that has engaged with your agency in a meaningful way. For many agencies, this community is likely much bigger than they think.
A talent community has three parts:
- Your placements – the people who are currently on contract or who worked with your agency in the past
- Your database, which is typically about 10x the size of your placements – the people who have applied but haven’t worked for you yet, who have downloaded a salary guide or other content, or who you could be nurturing but currently aren’t.
- Your potential network, which can be 100 times the size of your database – the people who are connected to those in your database via family ties, friend circles, and social media
“Being part of a community is being part of something bigger. It perpetuates an ‘I’ve got your back’ culture that can be very beneficial from a staffing agency perspective.” ~Rachelle Arnold, VP of Customer Experience at Staffing Referrals
“One of our core values is ‘create a team environment with the family spirit.’ We place people on contracts in facilities nationwide, and there is often a community already in place. It can feel like the first day of school. So, we work to create a community so our candidates feel like they have the support they need to be successful.” ~Eric Parker, VP of Talent Management Operations at Cell Staff
“For us, the associates come first. If they’re successful, our clients are successful. We extend our focus into the broader community, where our associates live and work. For example, we have an initiative called Project Home, which helps displaced people find a home and be able to continue working. Basically, we’re not just about getting one person a job. We’re always looking at what else we can do to support them.” ~Alyssa Zaccaria, Director of IT at Integrity Staffing Solutions
Talent networks can extend your reach by up to 100x
Why should you leverage your talent community?
Once you have a talent community in place, you can leverage it to fill your pipeline with high-quality candidates who are unique to you through a referral program. No other staffing firm can recreate your exact network, so this is a fantastic way to differentiate your services.
Referral programs aimed at your talent communities offer three key benefits. They improve the candidate experience, streamline your recruiting processes, and ultimately help you grow faster.
How do you turn your talent community into a competitive advantage?
Build your talent community
Define and understand your audience
Who are your champions? What are they saying about you? What’s their experience working for you?
“We’ve always valued reviews. Of course, we want people to be able to search for Cell Staff and see all of the awesome experiences our team has built for the candidates we’re placing, but we want them for feedback as well, so we can see areas we can improve. When we first engaged with Staffing Referrals, we checked the temperature with some of our ambassadors about the referral program and the payment process so we could provide them with the types of experiences they valued.” ~Eric Parker, VP of Talent Management Operations at Cell Staff
Leverage technology for engagement
Use your ATS, Bullhorn Automation, Great Recruiters, Staffing Referrals – all of the technology you have to engage your audience.
“From a tech perspective, having a referral program built on Staffing Referrals means that it’s almost foolproof. The ambassador’s information carries through with the candidate, so it’s easy to see when they get on assignment. The technology is what lets us really make good on the promise of a referral program. It instills a level of trust in us and in our community because nothing falls through the cracks anymore.” ~Alyssa Zaccaria, Director of IT at Integrity Staffing Solutions
Deliver value-added content and experiences
Use content and experiences to provide value to strengthen your community and keep people engaged. These experiences can create referable moments, i.e., moments when a candidate has such a great experience that they’re motivated to send a referral your way.
“We send our new hires a gift box in the mail – a Cell Staff branded box that has a branded clear bag, koozies, pens, a handwritten card. It shows our candidates that we care about them, that we’re excited for them to start an assignment with us, and that they have our support.” ~Eric Parker, VP of Talent Management Operations at Cell Staff
Foster community and word of mouth
There are many ways to do this – go out to your physical locations, gather reviews and share them with your network, create newsletters.
Evaluate and adapt
You have to be able to pivot when needed. You will find gaps in your process, so you need to be able to listen to what’s going on, pivot, and then promote your new initiatives.
Create a referral culture
Your referral culture is a combination of your referability and the steps you take to prioritize referrals. The first part is external – you need to be an agency that people want to refer their friends and family to.
“One of our core values is advocating for the associate’s success. And one of the great things that Staffing Referrals does is let the ambassador see the progress of their referrals through the process and see when they’re successful. That transparency is huge in advocating for the success of ambassadors, our associates, and our recruiters.” ~Alyssa Zaccaria, Director of IT at Integrity Staffing Solutions
The second part is external – everyone from your executive leadership to your recruiters needs to make referrals a top priority.
“Anytime you start a new program, you need to think about how you’re going to create excitement and show value. One thing that we’ve done for years is quarterly competitions for recruiters. So whether it’s a staycation, a bonus, extra PTO, or an iPad, we have an additional incentive over the quarter. Recruiters earn points for things like submissions, starts, etc. When we signed on with Staffing Referrals, we did triple start points for anyone who hired a candidate with the lead source being Staffing Referrals. So, we created some excitement to get the platform off its feet, and then over time as people work with more referrals, they see how much easier it is.” ~Eric Parker, VP of Talent Management Operations at Cell Staff
Step 3: Make sharing easy
Once you know your agency is referable, you want to make sure that sharing your program is easy. With Staffing Referrals, when a referable moment happens, candidates can easily refer their friends from their ambassador dashboard.
Ambassadors can copy their referral link and share it on social or text it directly to their friends. This is important because 77% of talent say they want unique referral links that they can share.
Here’s an example of an ambassador who shared their referral link for Integrity on Facebook. As you can see, this is someone who is doing marketing and promotion – essentially working as a commission-only recruiter – on behalf of Integrity.
The dashboards also increase trust and transparency because ambassadors can see where their referrals are in the process. With Staffing Referrals integrated into Bullhorn, the referral status updates in real time.
“Staffing Referrals is like the Domino’s Tracker for referrals. When you order a pizza from Domino’s, you can see when they’re making your pizza, when it’s in the oven, and when it’s in the car to be delivered. It creates trust with customers. Staffing Referrals does the same thing for referral programs. Our ambassadors can see how many people they’ve referred, how many have made it to assignment, and how much money they will make from those referrals. It encourages them to keep sharing their link.” ~Eric Parker, VP of Talent Management Operations at Cell Staff
In terms of making sharing easy, Integrity takes it up a notch by accepting referrals from anyone in the community, not just the associates who work for them.
“A woman who was in our network but had never worked for us ran an organization that supported women recovering from addiction. She referred a few friends, and they all got hired. Then the next thing we knew, she had referred 70 people and 32 of them got hired. That’s a whole other way to build a community and your referral network. It can be centers of influence. It doesn’t have to be your associates.” ~Alyssa Zaccaria, Director of IT at Integrity Staffing Solutions
As your ambassadors refer their friends and family to your agency, those friends and family can then become new ambassadors. In this way, your talent community will grow organically over time. Then you can engage and nurture those new ambassadors to send you more referrals.
Staffing Referrals automates these communications so your recruiters don’t always have to remember to ask for referrals.
“We benefit from the ‘set it and forget it’ aspect of Staffing Referrals. The automated reminders and notifications keep our referral program top of mind for our ambassadors. You just turn it on and it keeps generating activity and interest.” ~Alyssa Zaccaria, Director of IT at Integrity Staffing Solutions
The results
By focusing on their talent community, Integrity Staffing Solutions and Cell Staff have achieved incredible results with referrals.
In two years, Integrity has generated more than 2,400 placements from their 13,000 ambassadors, which translates into over $1.9 million in gross profit.
In six months, Cell Staff has generated 900 candidates from their 1,000 ambassadors. Their referral placements translate into over $400,000 in gross profit.
Are you ready to build and leverage your talent community? Book a demo of Staffing Referrals.