Hiring for IT services is tough and getting tougher by the day. Earlier, we would hire some skills in large numbers while niche roles would be few and far between. With rapid advancements in technology stacks, we are seeing an unprecedented number of hiring combinations across technology. In a bid to delight customers, hiring managers increasingly focus and demand ready talent. Ready talent across several technology combinations.
Top talents are always passive. The current trends in the IT sector is one where a candidate takes multiple offers before deciding on the one best suited for them. This causes multifold challenges. Attracting and hiring a 10X developer is not easy anymore. The best talents are slipping through the net and we at LTI realised the need to be innovative and proactive. To change the status quo, we focussed on improving the following metrics.
- Attract high quality talent in short time (Faster time to fill)
- Offer to joining ratios
- Reduce joining no shows (or reneges)
- Improve the employer brand
In IT services, we contribute to revenue growth by hiring quality people at speed. We partnered with RippleHire to build a high performing engine on top of employee referrals. Their technology helps us engage & bucket the right employees and proactively drive joiners. Referrals being cost-efficient helped us deliver significantly on hiring budgets.
Our team started with a deep dive analysis and analysed every sourcing channel from the lens of impacting the top line. We discovered that referrals is the best as it gives quality hire, increases the speed of hiring and provides highest offer to joining ratio’s. Additionally, the retention of employees was also highest through this sourcing channel. We broke down the process by answering the following fundamental questions.
- Is our culture/DNA supportive of referrals?
- Is the recruiting software sufficient for us to impact referrals?
While we were confident of our culture, we realized that to leverage the full power of our culture and employee workforce, we need to delight them with a “WOW” experience. Our recruiting system simply had a way for folks to be able to submit profiles or share jobs on social media. What was wholly missing was the ability to engage employees for right roles and then get them excited about bringing talent to LTI.
When we asked around for options to improve the referral channel on, we received good feedback on RippleHire’s employee referral platform. Having confirmed that it is compatible with our ATS, we went about conceptualizing the program.
We launched the MyRefer program in four weeks. Together with RippleHire, we strategized competitions and leverage experiential rewards to drive participation towards specific jobs. One of the creative campaigns that worked for us was a contest for early joiners. For every employee who get us a joiner in 30 days, we offered an iPhone X or a Honda Activa. This meant that we had 40% of our workforce hunt for early joiners in their network every month. This alone helped us improve our time to fill drastically bringing talent that was available and eager to join in 15 to 45 days as compared to the industry average of 90 days.
We also ran several campaigns continuously for walk-in drives, niche skill roles, project based roles and engaged the workforce using recognition, competition and experiential rewards.
Employee referral is our magic bullet for hiring quality talent quickly. Kudos to MyRefer team and RippleHire for helping us innovate in this area and help enable business growth
Engagement Score
1 in 2 employees participated in the referral program.
Employees hunting for early joiners
More than half our employees were hunting for early joiners, enabling us to shortcut the entire process.
Referral Outcome
Through employee referral program, hiring success has increased from 5% - 28%. 78% of these hires were for rare, niche and hard to hire skill jobs.
Increased brand visibility
6.75 lakh candidates (active and passive) have clicked and viewed our jobs.
Built a decent pipeline of candidates
The exercise also helped us build a decent pipeline of candidates who were willing to join the next month.
