Building an engaged team in your organization requires many different and constant efforts.  Leaders checking in with their team and managing goals as the situations change.  Team members reporting when they see a problem and collaborating with the people involved to find a solution. But even the process of recruiting additional team members through employee referral programs can be a point where you can foster those relationships and everyone’s engagement in the organization’s goals. 

Just like employees are often the closest to see a problem, they’re often connected to people that can help with those problems; engaging them in the search can foster a stronger team bond.  An employee may see firsthand the lack of a skilled marketing person or feel the strain of not enough resources on a project.  But from their past jobs, experiences on their job, volunteer work, or from any part of their social web they may be connected to people that would be a great fit.  Acknowledging the need for additional hands and soliciting team members on the skills, experience, and competencies needed to for those hands gives them a role in the process.  This way, all team members have contributed to shaping the requirements. 

Once the requirements are out there, make sure to engage all team members to help with the search.  Certainly, the team members that provided feedback and helped shaped those requirements should be reached out to help fill this post.  Depending on each person, this may mean forwarding the requisition’s link, thanking them for how their feedback shaped the requirements, or explicitly asking their help in finding people that fit the bill.  Here the point is to keep that momentum of that collaboration going to the search.  Their feedback can highlight not only the skills of that referral, but also how they fit into that position and can uniquely contribute to the team.  This can not only speed the time to finding the best candidate, but also getting that team member up to speed because the team can clearly visualize how they would fit into the team.  And of course, there’s also the oft touted benefit that referrals bring in team members that have and thus will work well together.

Happy Recruiting!

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