Great employees are the foundation of business success and growth for organizations. But finding the right talent can be challenging. Talent acquisition leaders constantly face the question of how (and where) to find great talent.

The easiest solution is to look at your existing network of employees. Employee referral programs are a great way to reach out to talent that is highly relevant in a much faster, efficient and cost-effective way. It’s not a surprise that employee referrals continue to be one of the top sources of hiring for companies.

However, the success of an Employee Referral Program depends on a lot of factors. It needs to be easy to follow, flexible, lucrative and most importantly, innovative and interesting and to add on, needs to be transparent in referral process and referral status. From the organization’s point of view, the program needs to be structured well, managed effectively and measured for success regularly.

Gamifying the Employee Referral Program

At Mphasis, we have a robust Employee Referral Program like many other organizations. But we constantly innovate to make the program top-of-the-mind and engaging with interesting campaigns. If your employees are not enthused about your Employee Referral Program, then you are most likely to see little results. We also recognized the need to empower our employees with the right tool so they can refer with no effort, and also take ownership of their referrals.

At Mphasis, we have a robust Employee Referral Program like many other organizations. But we constantly innovate to make the program top-of-the-mind and engaging with interesting campaigns. If your employees are not enthused about your Employee Referral Program, then you are most likely to see little results. We also recognized the need to empower our employees with the right tool so they can refer with no effort, and also take ownership of their referrals.

This is where gamification came into the picture. ‘Gamification’ is the usage of game tactics to a real life scenario, and we applied this to our Employee Referral Program. And thus with the set objective we re-launched a brand new Employee Referral Program called ‘iREFER’, built on a platform by RippleHire (www.ripplehire.com). iRefer allows our employees to view the latest and hottest job openings with the referral rewards, share the jobs on social platforms and refer people from their network – all on a single platform. In addition to this, employees get ‘karma points’, recognition and rewards for their referrals. The platform also features a leaderboard to highlight top referrers as well as encourage other employees to refer more people.

For our recruiters, iRefer allows access to granular data on each employee, referral, location, team, department, BU, etc. to monitor and measure the overall outcome. It also allows us to focus the energy of our employee pool towards hard to fill or ‘niche’ roles and use the power of our workforce effectively.

Innovative Campaigns

To keep the rigger stronger, we have collaborated with the CSR wings of Mphasis – F1 Foundation. Employees get an opportunity to contribute towards social responsibilities for their referral activities along with earning their referral rewards. This has been positively received by Mphasis.

iRefer Premier League

We have an exciting addition to our Employee Referral Program called the iRefer Premier League (iRPL) this month. Cricket is an extremely popular sport, especially in India. With the India Premier League (IPL), kicking off in April, it was a great time to launch a referral contest on the lines of cricket. By bringing in elements of IPL like the orange cap and mapping the various referral rewards to cricket, iRefer becomes a lot more interesting for our employees across the globe.

The 3-month long initiative will culminate at the end of June 2017 when we will reward the top performing individuals and teams in various categories like shortlisted referrals, job offers, top recruiters, etc.

We are looking forward to an entertaining employee referral engagement this season. If you know an Mphasian, don’t miss the opportunity in exploring the referral channel to fast track your way into Mphasis.

So stay tuned and watch this space for some exciting updates. Feel free to comment below if you have some interesting ideas.