HDFC LIFE builds a data driven sourcing engine on employee referrals seeing a 20% jump in source contributions

HDFC Life is one of India's leading life insurance companies, offering a range of individual and group insurance solutions that meet various life stage needs of customers. The products include Protection, Pension, Savings & Investments, Health, etc. It has about 421 branches and presence in 980+ cities and towns in India. HDFC Life distributes its products through a multi channel network consisting of Insurance agents, Bancassurance partners (HDFC Bank, Saraswat Bank, RBL Bank), Direct channel, Insurance Brokers & Online Insurance Platform

The key challenges faced by this industry are

• How do we enable higher retention among the workforce?
• How do I attract talent to work for insurance sales roles?
• How do we enable the right talent supply across 500+ distributed locations with RHR teams being in specific zonal and regional offices?
• How can we hire at speed so as to enable top line growth for our business functions across agency, bancassurance and direct sales functions?
• How do we convince offered candidates to join the sector so as to deliver key results?
• How do we reduce dependence on external partners through a central sourcing engine?

The talent sought after by the industry is not often available on job boards or professional social networks.

As hiring in this industry is mostly in bulk, recruiters need to hire in fairly distributed areas where there is no urban setup, increasing the difficulty in hiring through job boards and other sources.

This is where technology plays an important role and HDFC Life used it well to increase its hiring numbers.

RippleHire has helped us build a data driven sourcing engine on the employee referral channel. Our employees help us attract good talent that are excited to join and stay. This helps us impact top-line as a HR function. We are able to combine a delightful experience with a powerful engine for hiring using RippleHire.

Amit Sarawatea,
Talent Acquisition Head, HDFC Life

Solution

HDFC Life believed that increasing referrals would help hire quality talent quickly. Speed, Retention, Quality meant that the top line impact through this channel would be maximum. At the same time, referrals were cost effective meaning that any investments in this channel would pay off for itself.

 They partnered with RippleHire, market leaders in employee referrals with one key goal - Build a sourcing engine on top of referrals. As step one, Vibhash Naik, CHRO at HDFC Life setup a referral office manned with smart talent to work alongside the RippleHire customer success manager. This team revved up their creative engines and came up with lively campaigns to announce the program and increase employee engagement.

From a grand launch to welcome SMS to post launch survey, employees found the tool intuitive and found the experience very delightful. Intelligent SMS campaigns were done to target the right communities within HDFC LIFE to find the best talent in their networks.

RippleHire’s gamified platform helped the employees to share jobs with their peers on social platforms and become a brand ambassador for their organisation. The team had close to 2000 referrals within a month of launch.

Data driven analysis for ER platform

Employee referrals is a process with the input metrics as ‘participating employees’ and the outcome being joiners. The referral office initiated a data driven approach as it gave a clear idea on various aspects as mentioned below:

• Track how many employees participated and gauge the success of your referral program. Lower participation by select groups gave the team an opportunity to realign the referral program and make it more interactive than ever before.
• Know which vacancies are easier to fill. HDFC Life was able to devise strategies to increase the incentive for employees who successfully refer an applicant for that hard-to-fill mandate
• Track whether your social recruitment strategies are working. This helped the team to understand which social media channels are actually bringing great candidates and where their target group exists.
• Know how many new hires came from referrals. Research shows that referrals are 3-4 times more likely to be hired than non-referral candidates. Data coming from HDFC Life showed that this assumption is true.
• Know how long it takes to onboard a new hire. The referral office revealed that new hires coming from employee referrals were on-boarded faster than hires from other sources.

Having metrics is essential in determining the success of all employee referral programs. It thrives on baseline and end line data in order to help you analyze your current strategy and, therefore, allow you to improve your program accordingly.

Metrics  

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Employee participation

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Contribution to the source mix making it no.1 channel for hiring.

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Increased speed of hiring

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Brand views

More than 30K candidates (active and passive) have clicked and viewed our jobs on WhatsApp and other social media.