Providing an incredible referral network
The Lola team established a referral program to reward employees for introducing great people to their team. Then, they extended this referral reward to their entire network. Lola’s leadership team understood that referrals come from outside their network, so they used friends, family, investors, and customers to find top hires.
Stacey Scott, VP Member Services, has built great teams for years and has a philosophy for hiring the best people. “My job is to make my team so wildly happy they want their families and friends to work here too,” Stacey explained. At Lola, she has built her team from 0 to 18 travel assistants by using employee and community referrals as a key hiring strategy.
Using referrals to find tough-to-hire technical talent
In addition to travel assistants, Lola used Drafted to source and hire 4 software architects — a hiring spree that could easily cost a business $100,000 in contingency staffing fees. While several architects were referred externally from friends in Lola’s community, Software Architect Jeremy Debate, drafted two of his former engineering colleagues. Jeremy loved his teammates at Lola and wanted to contribute more than just his own expertise, “Everyone I worked with was an expert, and I wanted to draw from my network to add to that,” he said.
Lola reached a broader network to discover “hidden gem” candidates and get introduced to them with their referral program. Lola employees or friends could contact referrals more effectively— and even speak to their strengths and weaknesses— because they had worked together in the past. It was almost like the Lola team had this secret army of advocates recruiting for them.
