Firstbird has a brand new look. Why?
The last few years have proven to us that Firstbird is more than just a digital employee referral program for our customers. For our customers, it is a fundamental paradigm shift away from traditional external recruitment channels towards their own strengths and it is a big step towards the empowerment of their employees. With Firstbird, organizations give their employees a voice in the recruitment process. Instead of flying alone against the wind, talent acquisition departments have a flock of referrers behind them with the help of Firstbird. This way, organizations can source highly suitable talents who form better and more effective teams.
What has changed?
We have united our vision under the slogan “Shaping together”. Our target is to become the referral standard for medium and large enterprises around the world. Empowerment and appreciation are our underlying principles. Instead of recruiters having to fly alone against the wind to find new employees to join their flock, we help them use the network of their own flock to really take their recruiting to new heights.
Our sharpened positioning is supported by a new look and a new website. A cheeky neon-yellow color is supported by various shades of green and blue. The brushstroke of our yellow bird, Mr. Finch, is used as an additional design element. Flocks of birds are a central visual and textual part of our communication. Additionally, our logo evolved through a stronger and curved font.
Not only has the brand changed but the organizational structure too. Why?
Shaping Together is a long-term vision for us that we live as an organization. We believe that we will become a better and more successful organization if we give all our employees a voice and the power to shape the future of Firstbird. Therefore, we have changed our hierarchical pyramid organization to our swarm organization based on sociocratic principles.
From a hierarchical pyramid organization to a swarm organization – what has changed?
Our new swarm organization is based on 4 main principles:
- Distributed leadership: The traditional management function does not exist anymore. Leadership responsibilities are distributed among various new roles across multiple team members.
- Autonomy: Teams are working highly autonomously and receive decision power in order to work with a minimum of dependencies and decision-making loops.
- Empowerment: Decisions are more and more being made from the bottom up. Every team member who is impacted by a decision receives a voice in the decision process.
- Transparency: To enable every team member to make the right decisions we ensure that all relevant information is transparent and available.
A new reward shop has been added to your employee referral program. What benefits does this new feature bring?
Appreciation and rewards are the most critical success factors of an employee referral program. Throughout the last few years, we have developed a variety of highly engaging reward schemes together with our customers. These experiences have now been used to create a new reward shop. The underlying idea of this feature is that employees are not just rewarded for successful hires but selected activities as well. For smaller achievements like sharing a job or a referred candidate making it to the interview stage, they receive points. These points can then be redeemed in an individually tailored reward shop. The impact of this new feature for our pilot group was positive. The activity of the employees and the results of the referral program saw a high increase.
What can we expect next from Firstbird?
Today, we have already managed to make referrals to the most successful recruiting channel for the majority of our customers. Due to this, they dramatically cut their administrative recruitment efforts and slash costs for job ads and recruiting agencies. We will consequently pursue this mission with a clear goal to be the global standard for employee referrals.
To achieve this we are set for growth. We will double the number of employees in our headquarters in Vienna next year from 50 to 100 and speed up our international expansion.
From a product perspective, we will further facilitate global roll-outs together with key customers like McDonald’s, Deloitte and Deutsche Telekom. One focus of our product development is to improve the digital referral program for the inclusion of non-desk workers – for example in the health care or retail industry.
