Recruitment software company Graylink partners with Zao.com for referrals

Web and mobile recruitment software provider Graylink has partnered with Zao.com, which claims to be a leader in online recruitment referrals.

The partnership will see Graylink offering Zao’s solution in the South African market to its corporate clients.

Matthew Gray, Graylink head of business development, says the move is an important one as referrals are a critical part of the recruitment sourcing process, and have been the number one source of hire globally for as long as he can remember. The problem is that employee engagement in referrals is very low, causing companies to miss out on this valuable source of hire.

“Zao allows companies to use the business networks of their employees as well as social media networks to engage more employees, automate the referrals process, strengthening their social recruiting channel, which is already companies’ best channel for finding new talent,” Gray says.

“Add to this the ability to track and reward those who refer and you have a winning formula to increase the number of quality candidates being referred to your organisation.”

Ziv Eliraz, Zao Founder and CEO says that research shows time and again that referred candidates are generally more productive, stay for longer and are less likely to quit their jobs.

“Job seekers have gone social with 52 percent of job seekers using Facebook to find work, while one in five people have seen a friend of their share a job on a social network. Zao helps companies focus on referrals first, before reverting to lower quality sources of hire,” he says.

Zao uses two gamification methods to incentivise referrals — the leaderboard system, which offers milestone incentives; and the bounty system, which gives rewards for successful placements.

Employees are reportedly able to set up auto-referrals to push jobs out onto their social networks, Zao takes care of the tracking of referred applications and where they end up in the recruitment process. The system also rewards third parties outside of your organisation to refer jobs to their networks. Zao’s mobile support makes sure both candidates and referrers can engage on the go.

“We’ve seen that referral rewards increase engagement by up to 50 times with more employees participating in the referral process when gamification and automation are used,” Eliraz says.

Gray reckons the power of Zao’s platform lies in its integration with its companies’ Applicant Tracking System (ATS) — Neptune.

“Jobs which are added to Neptune can automatically be sent through to Zao’s platform and automated shares are then published out onto social networks. Candidates responses are tracked and integrated from Zao back into Neptune, giving the recruitment department complete control and visibility through the process,” he says.