Climbing to the Top: Career Website Ladders Makes Referrals Easier Through Automation

It’s said that you are the average of the five people you hang out with the most often. Many companies take this to heart when they think about different incentives to offer their employees, which is why it isn’t uncommon to find that many employees are offered referral bonuses. Companies want good employees to recruit their friends, who more than likely share similar values, work ethic, etc., while job seekers prefer to work for companies that their friends can vouch for. As such, referral recruiting can be great for everybody – and it can be even better with the help of technology.

Ladders: Recruiting Made Easy

Typically, trying to make a referral bonus means having to do a few things:

1) Staying up to date with what jobs are opening up in your company.

2) Keeping tabs on old friends and colleagues to find out who’s looking for a new job and when.

3) Making that connection between an interested party and your company’s HR department, or whoever is responsible for hiring. This could involve sending an email, making a phone call, arranging a meeting over coffee, etc.

If you really break it down, making that referral money isn’t actually all that quick and easy. However, as with everything these days, technology has stepped in to ease up the process of getting those referrals cheques rolling in. Thanks to the career site Ladders, the process is now automated.

Employees who use Ladders will be automatically notified if their company has a job opening. It’s possible to make up to $10,000 in referral bonuses through Ladders if the person who is referred gets hired by your company. With an impressive network base of over 9 million users, many of whom pay for premium membership, Ladders is already changing the way many companies hire – and the way employees get compensated for doing the referring.

Ladders for Job Seekers

Employees looking to make a quick buck aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit from Ladders. Besides the obvious pro of getting to work with a friendly face, job seekers also have something to gain from this career site’s automation process.

Currently, over 50 companies work with Ladders, including some very big names such as Bank of America and Johnson & Johnson. For now, Ladders is geared towards the American job market, but a quick search of Canadian cities such as Toronto shows that there are job postings in other places as well.

Besides the big names, a plethora of smaller companies also post jobs on a regular basis. You can search by location, job title and expected salary. Job descriptions and postings can include anything from PLC programming to electronics technician and everything in between. Naturally, this will depend on company openings.

By posting your resume onto your Ladders account, over 200,000 HR professionals are quickly able to match the right candidates for the jobs that best suit them. Recruiters can also directly email you an open position, and you will be alerted when your profile has been viewed.

These features are all available through Ladders’ free basic account, but the majority of users actually opt for paid Premium membership. This upgrade allows members to actually apply for positions, whereas basic membership requires users to wait on recruiters to send them a link in order to apply for a job opening.

The Future of Recruitment

From LinkedIn to Ladders, it’s becoming more and more obvious that the future of recruitment lies in automation. This is true of whether your experience is limited to taking a few online technology courses and a co-op position, or whether you’ve worked for several Fortune 500 companies as the head of a department or three. Online recruitment services are now simply taking advantage of what most of us have always secretly known – who you know counts just as much as what you know.

Thanks to automation, job seekers can now quickly make themselves available to many recruiters all over the world. Simultaneously, incentivized employees can easily help get their friends in getting new jobs, pick up a hiring bonus cheque, and contribute to their company in a couple easy steps. While the downside to employee-referral processes is that they can result in a lack of diversity in a company, automated job boards and referral systems also make it easy for recruiters and HR personnel to oppose this trend. As with seeking job seekers who seem like the perfect fit, it takes as little effort to explicitly seek out workers who might bring value in addition to diversity to a company. It’s a win-win situation for all!