Eqo – Employee Referral Solution for the Frontline vs. Lever

Perfect fit for: Large organizations with over 2,000 employees and a frontline workforce (such as nursing, technicians, waiters, retail associates and drivers). Currently managing referrals on spreadsheets or not truly tapping into the power of employee referrals. As a helpful benchmark to compare to, best-in-class organizations have 40% of their hires come through referrals. Less suitable for: Smaller organizations with less than 2,000 employees, no frontline workforce, and don't face challenges in employee referral management or engagement.

I think Lever is great for any sized company, but especially strong for smaller, growing teams. It's a very simple system, but clean, sleek, and very useful in any scenario. They have great support whenever you need it so those with smaller HR or People teams could easily benefit from their help. Can't think of too many scenarios where Lever wouldn't be well-suited, but maybe once you grow to International growth and hiring, it may be better to have a more Enterprise style business, set up for larger scaling.

Incentivized

• Automatically tracks and manages referrals, eliminating the need for spreadsheets.
• Provides a simple referring experience for frontline workers because it's all done via text.
• Targeted text campaigns to keep employees engaged with the referral program.
• Very passionate leadership team that also provides strategy and creative support to their customers as part of the service.

• Great integration: Keeps a list of Outlook email communication along with LinkedIn and other data sources
• Is fairly lively, not too much lag between screens even though it is looking through a lot of data.
• Has excellent reporting on how well each email message is working.

Incentivized

• One point I highlighted with their team was the importance of Eqo – Employee Referral Solution for the Frontline being able to function without ATS/HRIS integrations for smoother rollouts and pilot programs — and they've already successfully achieved this capability.

• [In my experience,] terrible customer support - pay more to get less...
• Integrations are spotty and can break without reason
• Lever has so much potential, but their Roadmap is lacking in ways that will really help customers succeed
• Focuses on the number of candidates and not the company's need to build talent in a cost effective, data driven and collaborative way
• Overpromised and underdelivered in [the] capability of the tool. [I believe that you should] not trust your sales team.

It isn't difficult to use for the applicant processing, but [I feel] if you want to pull reports or use their tools, good luck!

What support? - Add a ticket and get links to [I believe] their unhelpful user guide. Add a charge if you want better support - afterward just got those links faster...

The user experience is seamless--text-based with no app installation necessary. Employees don't want to download another app, so the text-based approach removes that friction point. I really like the SMS campaign feature in Eqo because it facilitates program socialization and targeted hiring in understaffed areas through team-specific SMS campaigns. My customers have been very impressed with the implementation process and support. They aren't just implementing the tech but advising on strategy and adoption.

Lever is comparable to Greenhouse in its basic recruiting functions. I have found it to be WAY better than Bullhorn (clunky and overly-complicated with a very dated and non-intuitive interface) and Jazz HR (slick and pretty, but limited in its functions). The best ATS I've used is the proprietary tool at Meta, but alas, that tool is for internal use only

Incentivized

• Increased talent attraction via referrals, effectively cutting down recruitment expenses.
• Minimized employee turnover, thereby reducing expenses related to backfilling and training.
• Increased employee referral engagement from frontline teams
• Eliminated any manual administration of tracking employee referrals, reducing double payments and missed payments

• Lever provides an enormous ROI by getting us in front of the right candidates that are going to make us more money and more successful as an org.
• I think that both the quality and quantity of new hires has gone up ever since we started using lever and involving the entire org in the process.
• It also saves us a lot of time because we don't need to send referrals via email, while saving/attaching resumes and such.

Incentivized