How Firstbird helped Ravensburger to triple their number of hires through referrals in the first 6 months

“I know someone…” – the phrase has become increasingly valuable in recruitment teams to fill open positions quickly and reliably. Therefore, due to their high demand for temporary workers per year (around 1,000), Ravensburger’s recruitment teams made employee referrals one of the recruiting strategies. The challenge they were facing was in handling the high administrative workload when managing the employee referralsAnd as a result, only 3% of new hires were referred hires at that time.

That suddenly changed with the Firstbird employee referral program implementation. The goal of implementing the new tool was to satisfy the workforce demand by improving the employee referral recruiting channel, obtaining faster and more cost-effective recruiting and gaining reliable hires. Moreover, Ravensburger needed an employee referral program that would safeguard the personal data gathered through referrals.

Ravensburger turned to Firstbird when choosing an employee referral program primarily because Firstbird met all requirements regarding data protection. Our digital employee referral program fully meets data privacy standards: it is GDPR compliant and offers the customization of data privacy regulations.

Furthermore, Ravensburger, whose mission is “Playful Development”, chose Firstbird also thanks to its gamification approach. Within the Firstbird employee referral program, gamification is used to encourage employees to register as Talent Scouts and provide referrals through the incentives. Customers can set up a premium reward shop for their Talent Scouts that provide referral bonuses or monetary rewards. 

Approach

Firstbird was easily implemented for Ravensburger, thanks to the seamless integration with the d.vinci applicant tracking system. To introduce the digital employee referral program to the employees and convince them to register as Talent Scouts, Ravensburger fully employed Firstbird’s consulting support. The approach consisted of targeted communication to employees. Employees were informed about the Firstbird introduction a week before its implementation. An intranet website page was created to promote employee awards as an incentive for Talent Scout registration. It also contained videos provided by Firstbird regarding the information about the program. The most significant result was obtained thanks to free coffee as an incentive: 100 Talent Scouts registered within the first three days. 

Results

For games and book manufacturer Ravensburger, it now only takes a few clicks from referral to hire. A seamless integration between Firstbird and their ATS (d.vinci) allowed recruitment teams to reduce administrative efforts significantly. Due to this successful integration, they were able to improve the speed of communication across departments and with applicants, while drastically increasing their data protection capabilities. Moreover, Firstbird implementation made it easier for employees to make referrals, thus bolstering their participation within the employee referral program. As an incentive for Talent Scouts to continue providing referrals, Ravensburger offers a monetary reward of €500 on average for each successful referral. 

“So far, we have been able to fill 90 positions through Firstbird – that’s triple the number of positions we’ve filled with the previous approach.” 

Thomas Wagner
Head of Human Resources DACH, Ravensburger AG

As a result, within 6 months that this data was collected, there were 4,814 job shares and 352 applications through Firstbird. As a result, the number of referred hires tripled and one in four referred applicants were hired. Moreover, Ravensburger met their goal of obtaining high quality of referrals.