In utopia, employee referral programs work. In such a place you have existing employees roping in star performers for your team. These performers hit the ground running and soon profits zoom northwards. Finding the right candidates through referrals and this system working out at scale is indeed every recruitment team’s dream. The reality, unfortunately, is not quite as perfect.

Employee referral programs are amongst reliable recruitment strategies as they take a short time to hire and usually have a low turnover, and can improve the time and cost of hire along with the quality. While all this looks great, employee referral programs while attempting to save time and simplify recruitment end up adding more load on HR. There’s a maze of paperwork, documentation, emails, clicks and even then, there is no guarantee that the interview time spent on the individual will not be a waste…frustrating enough to lay the referral program to rest.

The other challenge with referral programs is that no matter how great, these are hard to be executed at scale. What are the chances of you getting 50 referrals for a niche job role?

The Challenge

One of our clients, a large multinational in the BFSI space, was going through this agonizing process when they finally reached out to us. It turns out that the company had fluctuating hiring requirements and needed access to relevant resumes and candidates often at scale and across cities. 

Their employee referral program, although looked good on paper, was not adding value to the actual recruitment process. On further investigation, it was revealed that while the company was receiving resumes through the employee referral program, the busy recruitment team was able to connect with the candidates only after 20-30 days. By that time, the candidates would have lost interest in the company or would have already taken up some other job. 

The Solution

Clearly, the organization’s recruitment process was less than optimal and needed an upgrade. While individually employee referrals and career site applications couldn’t be attended to immediately, the power of technology could make these sources work together and deliver better. The solution to their recruitment woes lay in increasing their efficiency to connect with the right candidate and increase the speed at which the recruitment activity could be conducted.

Integrating our AI-enabled candidate calling platform with their Application Tracking System (ATS) was the first step. Doing this gave the organization a consolidated resource pool to connect with candidates both from the employee referrals as well as from career application sites.

The recruitment process was then given a simple facelift. Earlier, recruiters would call potential candidates, ask them preliminary questions and evaluate interest and then set up tests to assess candidate capabilities. With our solution, this multiple-step process became simpler, more efficient and less time-consuming, and effort-intensive.

The Impact

Upon integration of our AI-powered calling solution with the company’s ATS, we created an API that would send out an email with a test link to the desired pool of candidates. This mail would be auto-sent at 6.00 PM every day. In the first step, the Callify AI solution would confirm if the test was completed or not. If not, then the solution would call back again at a later date to seek confirmation of the same. If the test submission is confirmed then the solution would then set up the interview calls with the right and desired candidates. 

We set up 37 cluster locations for this client across Nagpur, Baroda, Pune, Delhi, and Coimbatore. The solution was also designed to call up these candidates across the clusters to verify their attendance and collect their feedback.

With this solution in place, our client could screen a larger number of qualified candidates and add agility and speed to their interview process. The client could make use of the free and available applicant data at hand and accelerate their interview process. The intelligent voice calling platform used pre-record messages in recruiters’ voices and smart scripting to communicate the job message to the potential candidates. 

Using our platform, the client could 

• Verify the candidate attendance and feedback 
• Influence some of the most crucial hiring metrics such as time to hire and the quality of the hire positively
• Improve recruitment outcomes by gaining access to more qualified candidates 
• Ensure that their workforce is not wasting time and effort completing low-value tasks

If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then this pudding hit just all the right notes.

Connect with us to see how we can give your recruitment process the AI makeover.