Gap between hiring volume and budgets pushes employee referrals

The gap between volume of hiring and hiring budgets has widened in 2015. With a decrease in the hiring budget, talent leaders see employee referrals and retention as a priority for their organisation, as per LinkedIn India Recruiting Trends 2016 study.

Thirty six per cent of the talent leaders surveyed in the study stated that employee retention is a top priority over the next 12 months. To address employee retention, leaders will also have to focus on internal hiring and transfers as re-skilling has become easier. Currently only 5 per cent of the leaders look at internal hiring as a priority. The study says employee referrals and social networks as recruitment tool is here to stay.

Fifty five percent of talent leaders stated that employee referral programmes were the top source of quality hires and 42 per cent considered social professional networks as equally important. Both sources were said to be long-lasting therefore preferred. In fact India leads the globe in the usage of referral programmes with 65 per cent organisations using employee referrals as against the global average of 39 per cent.