Castlight Health is a health benefits platform that engages employees to make better healthcare decisions and can guide them to the right program, care, and provider. The company’s mission is to empower people to make the best choices for their health and to help companies make the most of their health benefits. They partner with 200+ customers representing 25+ industries across America, spanning millions of lives.
Castlight Health was founded in 2008. The company has been growing significantly since going public in 2014 and currently has over 400 employees.
Castlight Health went public on the New York Stock Exchange on March 14, 2014
With Castlight Health’s rapid employee growth, the small talent acquisition team relied on employees to help find and attract qualified talent for open roles. However, the level of employee engagement was low and the company’s referral process wasn’t effective or scalable. Employees made referrals by emailing the talent acquisition group with resumes of friends or family, often with no particular job or role in mind. This ambiguity led to a lot of manual work to track and follow up with each lead, which took away valuable time to source and recruit for Castlight’s hiring needs.
Castlight turned to LinkedIn Referrals to help them engage employees and leverage more efficient ways to manage their employee referral program.
LinkedIn Referrals helped drive employee engagement by proactively sharing with employees suggestions of members in their personal networks on LinkedIn who might be good fits for specific roles at the company. John Bush, Head of Talent Acquisition at Castlight Health knew this type of engagement would have a big impact. “The value I saw in LinkedIn Referrals is the ability to refresh your memory. Showing people in your network that could fit a certain job is a powerful tool in jogging people’s memory.”
By making suggestions of specific roles and streamlining a referral candidates application, LinkedIn Referrals saved recruiters time from trying to match cold recommendations from employees to open positions at the company.
And since LinkedIn Referrals integrates with ATS systems, Castlight no longer needed to monitor an email alias for referrals – applications were tracked in their ATS automatically. Recruiters continued to follow their normal workflow in their ATS system, but a new candidate source was added indicating that an applicant came from LinkedIn Referrals. This integration also eliminated administrative work and promoted engagement by automatically updating employees on the status on of their referral candidates.
This referral process shows us if the candidate is really interested because they’re opting-in through their application. This allows our TA team to spend more quality time with people that are interested in a real job in their strike zone rather than just a blind consortium of resumes that don’t fit.
Castlight Health has gone from ~ 20% of employees making referrals, to 34% of employees making referrals within the first 7 months of launching and participation continues to grow.
Castlight Health employees at the company headquarters in San Francisco
The employee experience of using LinkedIn Referrals helped to drive that high engagement. “Employees that went into the tool all had very, very positive feedback. They were telling us things like, ‘wow this is easier, and it reminds me of people I know in my network’ ” said Bush.
Castlight has also seen efficiency gains for recruiters with no more email monitoring, resume uploading or work to see what type of role would be a good fit for a potential referral candidate. According to Castlight, “LinkedIn Referrals has transformed our employee referral program.”