Social Media Platform Feature : Zalp - Automates Employee Referral Program

ZALP has been founded by Aatish Dedhia who is an IIT Bombay alumnus. Aatish has earlier worked at Intel Corporation in the United States and was part of the core design team on the Pentium-II processor.

We are currently a team of 35 people with the right blend of experience and expertise.

About the platform:

ZALP essentially automates and streamlines the entire employee referral program of an organization while at the same time integrates it with the potent potential of social media using its advanced social media capabilities.

The unique aspect about ZALP is that it gives employees not one but seven easy and convenient ways to refer jobs to their connections.

Interesting features like the ZALP Match ensures that even if employees do not have a top of mind connection to make a referral, the feature suggests the most relevant referral matches for a job out of their own social network connections.

Features such as ZALP Share makes referring easier than ever before. This one-click share feature takes jobs to thousands of passive candidates present on the social platform, giving organizations the opportunity to go beyond just the first degree connections of their employees.

What employees love about ZALP is that it gives them real time updates on the status of their referrals right from the referral to the selection stage. The features of ZALP have so uniquely been devised that the referral process for employees has been simplified to just a click of a mouse.

Interesting features such as Analytics makes sure that recruiters and hiring managers can completely track and monitor the ROI of the referral program.

ZALP has also taken a step ahead and introduced a gamification angle to the referral process through its newly launched Leader board feature.

These fun features drastically accelerate employee participation which in turn results in a considerable reduction in the cost and time spent per hire.

The best part about ZALP is that it can seamlessly integrate with an organization’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS). ZALP will be in perfect sync with the ATS, thereby saving time and effort on the part of the recruiters.

Whom do we cater to?

As of now we are targeting the US markets. Organizations with employee strength of more than 500 employees receive maximum benefit from our tool, since smaller organizations can manage a manual program without the need for automation.

However, we are receiving an increasing number of inquiries from organizations in the UAE, Europe and Australia, which is why we plan to expand to these regions soon.

What do we offer to our consumers?

During our initial days of research with recruiting professionals, one glaring fact that surfaced was that Employee Referrals was voted as the most preferred source of recruiting for organizations. However, although most organizations preferred this source and wanted to make it the top source in their recruiting mix, they were unable to do so because of one common problem – low employee participation.

Most recruiting professionals cited one common problem- as much as they would like to increase their hires through referrals, considering that it is the most cost effective and also the highest quality yielding source, their employees just did not participate enough. And an employee referral program without participating employees is crippled irrespective of the attractive bonuses attached to it.

Taking this insight forward, our research team then started with the second phase of our global research – with the employees.

In this phase of the research, the team got in touch with several employees of different global organizations to understand their thoughts, views and reasons for low participation in the referral program. The findings of this research is what lead to the conceptualization of ZALP. All employees cited either one of the following reasons for their lack of participation or interest in the referral program -

• The entire referral process was very tedious and time consuming. Employees were made to fill in long forms to submit referrals.

• Employees had to constantly check with recruiters regarding open positions. There was no systematic communication mechanism between recruiters and employees.

• Once a friend was referred by an employee, there was no way to keep track of the progress of their referrals in the recruitment process. Employees mentioned that they had to constantly follow up with recruiters for a status update. This was a major reason for them to stay away from referring again.

• There was no mechanism to track referral rewards and employees had to indefinitely wait or follow up with the HR/Payroll team

• Employees also mentioned that the HR team would ask for referrals at odd times, mostly when employees were already caught up in their routine work and hence they could not think of potential referrals when required.

Keeping all of these points in mind, ZALP and its features were conceptualized (as mentioned earlier, in response to the first question).

What motivated us to begin?

As mentioned above, we realized that ‘not being able to tap into the powerful potential of employee referrals’ was a major and common problem faced by all organizations. And recruitment being a significant part and process of a business there was never a doubt regarding the working of the concept. Also when we realized the impact social media could make on a referral program when used effectively we were more than sure that the tool would receive instant acceptance since it directly addresses a latent problem.

What's in a name?

The name ZALP was something that was unanimously decided upon by the entire team. ZALP essentially is a combination of two words – ZAP and ALP; Zap standing for ‘quick’, ‘fast’ and ‘agile’- this being exceptionally important for every startup and is followed in all aspects in terms of the ‘go to market’ strategy, developing features, enhancing the product etc., and ALP symbolizing ‘reaching great heights’ and ‘growth’. We, as a team, are an ambitious bunch and hence ‘fast growth’ is inherent in us right from it being in our name.

How do we see Social Media?

Social media today has stumped everybody beyond imagination. Nobody probably ever anticipated the power of social media to such an extent. Talking about the role of social media in ZALP – it forms the base of our tool. Social media unleashes the potential of employee referrals and takes it to a different level altogether.

Imagine a small company of just 100 employees; each employee connected to a minimum of 150 people on their social networks – this in itself gives an organization access to a large pool of potential candidates (150*100 = 15000 candidates). Now imagine what would happen for a larger organization. A social media integrated referral program gives employee referrals a new lease of life altogether and if used effectively also makes referring easier for employees by giving them multiple touch points to reach out to their connections.

Apart from just helping organizations easily attract valuable referrals, a social media integrated referral program works very well to establish a strong employer brand. No branding activity can be better than having your own employees sharing jobs on their social networks. This directly stands for happy employees who love their workplace.

Currently we are....

We started as a small team of 5 people comprising of just a couple of developers, UI designers and a project manager. However in a short span of a year we have built a strong team of 35 people with professionals from diverse backgrounds and experiences each adding value in his/her own unique way to the team as a whole. We are also looking forward to increasing the size of our marketing and sales team, now that we have plans to expand to other regions.

In terms of consumer base, having started from scratch, it gives us immense joy in having 6 renowned corporations in the US as our clients today. More so since all of this was achieved within a short span of just about a year.

Our biggest challenge was...

Just like any other startup operating in the B2B space, referencing was by far one of our biggest challenges in the very early days of sales. Every prospect we engaged with found immense value in our tool, but as an organization we needed references. So closing the first two deals was difficult and required generating trust and faith in the product and company but from then on there was no looking back.

We want to dominate the world by...

Plans for the future are most certainly expanding to other regions such as UAE, Australia and Europe. Apart from that, we also plan to launch high end features that will enable recruiters and employees to leverage the social platform in a more targeted way. Currently ZALP integrates with Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. We also plan to integrate with Google Plus, Youtube and other niche platforms.

We’re making moolah by...

ZALP works on an annual subscription model.

Lastly, are you hiring?

Yes we are! We currently have open positions.

• Marketing Associate (0-2 years exp)
• Marketing Executive / Sr Mktng Exec (1-3 years exp)
• Business Development Executive – International Markets (1-3 years exp)
• UX Developer/Lead – (2-10 years exp)