The Recruiting Reel Episode 27: How to Bring Your Entire Company Into the Recruiting Process

Josh Tolan: My name is Josh Tolan and I’m the CEO of Spark Hire, the leading video interviewing platform used by thousands of organizations around the world.

And this is The Recruiting Reel, a video series in which we discuss real recruiting challenges with prominent recruiting experts to provide you with actionable tips you can apply to your own recruiting.

Today, I am joined by Shelli Nelson who is the Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition at Relativity which makes e-Discovery software to help users organize data, discover the truth, and act on it. She is also the President of the Board of Directors at Chicago SHRM.

Shelli is super passionate about people and her career accomplishments back that up.

She has nearly 20 years of experience understanding business strategies, building organizations that are structured to excel, locating phenomenal talent and designing and executing innovative programs that propel companies beyond the competition.

We all know that current employees can have a huge impact on hiring quality people, but how do you bring your entire company into the recruiting process to drive results?

Fortunately, Shelli has the answers!

Shelli Nelson: For us, it’s about bringing the best possible talent to Relativity, and our employee referral rate is very high. On a given day, it’s an average of 42%, and we take great pride in that. We also take great pride in the fact that our employee referral rate is actually 9% more diverse than our standard applicant pool.

We are a fast-growing tech company. Our team members take great pride in our products, whether it’s building out new features for Relativity, or building out our cloud solution, Relativity One. They get excited about the work that they do and they want to share that with everyone in their network. So that’s how we get involved with our culture of recruitment initiatives. 

We start by educating our new hires on our product, our strategy, our impact in the tech community and beyond. Then, we like to make it very easy for them. We have a new ATS system, Lever, which makes it very simple for employees to submit referrals. And we are in constant communication with our entire organization about how important employee referrals are to us.

Don’t force your employees to engage in the hiring process! If it isn’t genuine, it won’t work. And, also, if you’re not in HR or Talent Acquisition, don’t expect employees to have the resources that they need.

You want to start by educating them on your product, your strategy, also encourage them to send referrals by having a strong employee referral bonus and constant communication of your culture of recruitment efforts.

Josh Tolan: Thanks, Shelli. It’s amazing that what you have done with driving employee referrals at Relativity and your advice will certainly help people who are trying to empower their team to boost referrals at their respective organizations.

There is no better source of quality candidates than employee referrals, but what do you do if you’re either a small company and don’t have a lot of employee referrals flowing in or you’ve maximized your employee referral channel?

This is where you can bring your company into the recruiting process as a conversion mechanism.

Think about the candidates in your pipeline. They are evaluating your organization along with the others they are interviewing at.

How can you stand out and convert these candidates into employees? This is where you can leverage your employees’ voices to tell the story about what it’s like to work at your organization.

Develop strategies to get your employees to create content that can be used to get candidates excited about working for you.

I’m talking about selfie video testimonials, blog posts, quotes for your careers page, and more.

Share this content with candidates that are already in your hiring funnel and you’ll be amazed with the conversion results.

I want to thank Shelli Nelson for joining us today. If you’d like to learn more about Relativity, go to relativity.com. If you want to connect with Shelli on LinkedIn, use the url below.

Thank you for watching The Recruiting Reel and stay tuned for more episodes. For additional HR and recruiting content, head over to hr.sparkhire.com and subscribe. Also, follow us on Twitter, @sparkhire. And subscribe to our YouTube channel to be the first to know about the newest episodes of The Recruiting Reel.

Thanks again for watching and happy recruiting!