Why your employee referrals fail: one variable that can single-handedly impact the success of employee referrals in every organization regardless of size is your internal marketing strategy.

Check out these 7 great employee advocacy examples from which you can learn about the power of employee advocacy in the workplace.

Maybe we simply reject the concept of "rejected candidates" and think of it as "talent recycling." Maybe changing the label will get companies to start to realize that the process of enraging a hundred people (who talk VERY LOUDLY to their own communities, I assure you) just to find one person to whom to make the offer (which will be rejected 40% of the time!), is insane. To that end, FireFish has some rudimentary (and yet somehow NOT standard practice in most companies) ways to get more out of your recycled talent.

This one made me smile and groan at the same time. As hiring is so tight in the Bay Area, employees at top companies are selling referrals and references to their employers. That is, for $50, you can get someone at Google or Facebook to recommend you for a job at Google or Facebook. Because those companies get some many resumes/applications, they mostly only look at those with internal referrals, and thus a third-party black market sprung up. (Further proof that William Gibson was right when he wrote "the street finds its own uses for things.)