Product madness case study

This UK based gaming platform increased employee referrals by 25%. They filled all their open tech roles and built a tech candidate pool of almost 40,000 in less than 12 weeks.

product madness started a pilot with real links and never looked back...

Founded in 2007, Product Madness is a social slot gaming platform that brings together groundbreaking, land-based slots with some of the greatest social slots gaming anywhere on the web. With around 190 staff in their London office, Product Madness have experienced extraordinary growth, and with that comes an ongoing requirement for brilliant tech talent.

As well as the usual fierce competition for talent in the tech sector, Product Madness were finding their consumer brand and employer brand were at odds. Their consumer brand targeting 50+ females with a love for slot machines, and their employer brand targeting high potential developers who love modern gaming. This disparity meant finding the volume of the right kind of tech candidates was challenging.

They concluded the quickest way to build a great talent pool and increase applications to their open developer roles was to encourage automated employee referral from their current tech team. Engaging that team to refer with their favourite activity, gamification. They found Real Links and started a pilot immediately.

Watch the full Product Madness story here

Within the first 3 months of using Real Links we'd already seen more referral hires than in the entirety of 2019. That's a 25% year on year increase which is astronomical.

We were more reliant on agency recruitment than we'd like. We needed a platform to help us engage employees with referral.

access to the tech team's extensive online networks

The Real Links customer success team began by running multiple focus groups with the Product Madness tech team. We discovered the type of rewards that motivate them, why they didn’t refer already and what would encourage them to start.

It was time to get their connections synced with the platform and start referring.

Through focus groups, we found out which platforms the tech team have the most connections on. We first connected the standard platforms LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Email.
The tech team used GitHub extensively so we built an integration with that platform providing an even richer data set on potential tech candidates.
The platform would then autosuggest referrals for the employee to send to HR. Alternatively HR could proactively request referrals based on anonymised data from their employee's networks.

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bespoke gamification and rewards

Lack of a solid gamification strategy is one of the key reasons participation and longevity of referrals is low in most businesses. This was a major advantage for Product Madness who’s tech team love gaming.

Gamification was a huge factor in gaining massive employee engagement with referral. We used the focus groups to identify what type of rewards would motivate the team and what gamification techniques they respond best to. These were the actions from that research:

Product Madness had historically offered high financial rewards for employee referral, but this wasn't the main motivator for most people. Small, relevant incremental rewards throughout the hiring process were far more effective.
We created competitions to encourage them to maximise engagement with the platform in return for points and prizes.
We customised Product Madness' leaderboards based on a reward strategy that directly reflected tech team feedback.

tracking referrals through the whole recruitment process

Through the focus groups we learned a lack of transparency on the status of referred candidates left tech employees disengaged. We were able to provide employees full visibility into their referred candidates’ application process from referral, to interview through to hire. All through their personal dashboard.

size of tech talent pool built in less than 12 weeks

increase in year on year referrals since 2019

open tech roles filled in under 12 weeks

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the first 6 weeks...

Within 12 weeks Product Madness had achieved amazing results which were tracked and optimised throughout the pilot process. But, a lot of that activity actually took place during the first 6 weeks of the pilot.