Referral Mapping to Scalable Hiring
When we first started, our company wasn’t called TalentHub. It was called Referable, and our very first product was something simple: a referral mapping tool.
This tool was inspired by an internal system developed by a major global technology company’s Japan recruitment team. Recruiters there were trying to automate what headhunters have done manually for years with giant spreadsheets — tracing people’s networks.
The idea was straightforward: map employees to their former colleagues (based only on publicly available data such as employment dates, company names, and locations), and filter those networks by skills relevant to the job at hand. Once a shortlist was created, employees could review the profiles in just a few clicks:
Refer directly – if they knew the candidate personally and recommended them.
Recommend – if they thought the candidate looked strong but didn’t know them well enough for an introduction.
Not recommended – if they had reasons to advise against.
Don’t know – to rule out irrelevant connections quickly.
Recruiters could then take the shortlist, prioritise warm leads, and engage in outbound outreach.
We trialled this software with several global companies. The response was consistent: “We love this tool.” Unfortunately, as a small venture we couldn’t get the regional approvals to roll it out commercially. It was tough to compete in the crowded SaaS recruitment space — but the proof of concept worked.
And this is where RPO comes in.
Why Referral Mapping is a Natural Fit for RPO
For agencies or firms looking to move beyond contingency recruitment — a market that is increasingly squeezed — an RPO engagement offers a more strategic, embedded approach.
By embedding a recruiter inside a client organisation, you can run structured referral programmes that go far beyond ad-hoc employee referrals. Instead of leaving referral hiring to chance, the RPO recruiter can:
Continuously map talent pools from adjacent industries and skill sets.
Build intellectual property around the candidate market.
Leverage employees’ trust to validate potential hires.
This is especially relevant in emerging technology sectors such as AI. Companies often need to hire talent where no established “AI experience” exists. Instead, they look to adjacent fields like machine learning, data science, or even data mining. In these cases, trust and network validation matter far more than job titles.
History shows this pattern again and again: Juniper drew heavily from Cisco, VMware built its teams by hiring from neighbouring technologies, and many of today’s best companies were formed by pulling trusted talent from adjacent spaces.
How TalentHub Supports RPO Delivery
We’ve built on our early referral mapping concept and expanded it into a broader platform that RPO providers can use to:
Streamline sourcing – automated mapping and candidate scoring across networks.
Accelerate referrals – simple one-click employee feedback mechanisms.
Support recruiters – dashboards and workflow tools to manage volume hiring.
Build lasting IP – all candidate insights and market maps are captured as company knowledge.
Instead of endless spreadsheets or siloed ATS data, the client gains structured visibility of their market. For the RPO provider, this creates stickiness, strategic value, and a move away from the contingency fee squeeze.
Conclusion
Referral-based hiring has always been part of how great companies are built. The difference now is that with the right tools, it can be done systematically, at scale, and as part of a strategic RPO solution.
TalentHub’s platform is designed to help RPO providers move beyond transactions and become true talent partners — embedding themselves in their clients’ organisations, and delivering hires based not only on skills, but on trust.
