An employee referral program optimizes the number of hires coming via your workers’ private networks. You offer employees a financial or other reward for referrals that cause hires. It is a terrific way to recruit star performers, because people working for you are likely to know other talented men and women.
When your employees consult with friends and family, they will have to be able to let them know about why your organization is a good place to workwith. Insert a description of your company, and gather reviews on your Really Company Page to make a fantastic impression. Thanks to Indeed for sponsoring this report.
Step 1: Prioritize Your Target Hires
When developing an employee referral program, you will want to decide if you would like to accept referrals for each open position. In case you have the budget to accept referrals and offer rewards for all places throughout the board, then that’s great. Otherwise, here are the types of places that usually work well for a referral application:
- Positions that you want to fill fast
- Positions which you’ve had a difficult time filling through project boards along with other traditional paths
- Senior level positions
- Niche positions that require very technical expertise
It’s very good to understand your hiring priorities are before starting your communications push.
Measure 2: Communicate Job Requirements To Employees
As soon as you’ve prioritized your goal hires, then you need to inform your employees exactly what you’re looking for from an ideal candidate for every available position. Here are a few things to keep in mind.
Provide a Concise Summary of Job Requirements
People that will refer potential employees require a means to quickly decide whether a position may be a good match for someone they know.
Starting with a fantastic job description for each open position is crucial, but workers may also require something more concise than a work description. So prepare a very short summary of the job responsibilities, experience requirements, and why it’s such an wonderful prospect. (you may see our article on Employer Branding for suggestions on how to produce your firm appealing.) Ideally, the summary should be significantly less than a paragraph. You could always connect to the complete job description which includes information on advantages such health care or commuter benefits for more details.
Send Single Requests for Referrals
If you’re hiring for multiple positions, send referral requests one at a time. You want your referral source to be able to quickly edit or prepend your concise requirements email and then forward it to a candidate. Grouping different job types makes it difficult to do and can also overwhelm them.
Remind Workers to Refer People
If the referrals do not come pouring in, remind your employees about the employee referral program and also the reward you’re offering. Have a program in place to send reminder emails, and utilize internal societal posts.
Step 3: Make It Easy For Employees To Refer
To maximize employee referrals, then you wish to produce your employee referral application as simple as possible for the referrers.
Post Jobs that Need Referrals in 1 Place
Place each the jobs that need referrals in one place like a intranet home page or weekly group email. You might also use an Truly Professions page for a way to have every one of your available tasks in 1 spot. It’s easy to update your Indeed Careers webpage whenever you fill a position, so it always accurately reflects your hiring needs
Get Shareable Media
For each communication channel, you may make an readily shareable message for referrers. By way of example, fully shaped emails ready for canned and forwarding tweets, LinkedIn articles, and Facebook posts.
Route Referrals Throughout a Specific Hiring Pipeline
As stated above, candidates who are referred by existing employees are often of a higher calibre than your run of the mill candidate who responds to a project posting. Thus, path referral candidates via a different hiring pipeline. This may take the form of a technical email — [email protected] — or it might be a Slack station devoted only for referrals. Click here to learn about to make professional email addresses to your enterprise.
Measure 4: Give The Ideal Referral Rewards
Most companies that have an employee referral program provide monetary benefits when a referral leads to a hire. This is almost always a fantastic idea, but depending upon your workers, work culture, and budget, you may want to consider beyond the typical referral cash bonus. Sure, plenty of people like money, but that might not be the best incentive.
Cash
Most companies begin with money rewards for referrals. These could be broken down into pieces to create a much better incentive. For instance a little bonus to get a referral, a bigger bonus for a hire, and also an additional bonus after the hire lasts for 90 days. In terms of dimensions, a Meritage Report on referrals reported that 69 percent of companies used cash bonuses between $1,000 and $4,999.
Besides some standard incentive for many positions, you might choose to create short-term additional incentives for hard to fill positions. For instance, double click the referral bonus for a position that you’ve been struggling to fill, or double click the referral bonus for per month if you want to really ramp up hiring and fill a bunch of places in a brief period of time.
Recognition & Thank You
A good deal of the incentive to perform a referral is feeling good about helping or getting recognition for this. By way of instance, a Google study found that people awareness of sourcing a hire was a much better incentive for referrals than cash bonuses. So send a personal thank you note whenever someone sends a referral. Also send a private or company-wide thank you in case the referral turns into a hire.
You could call out kudos to the referrer for a successful hire in the company newsletter or comprehend the worker during a team wide meeting.
Prizes
Who does not love decorations? Companies will frequently create drawings for quite large prizes such as a Caribbean excursion or plasma TV for referrals. Frequently, paid time off can work as a decoration as well. If you’re on a small budget, you can provide a prize just to the employee who gives the referrals at the end of a month or a year.
Measure 5: Track Referrals & Measure Success Of Your Reminders App
The last piece you’ll need to make the most of your referral application is typical of all programs: measurement, and iteration. You should have a system in place to track:
- Overall amount of employee referrals and number of referrals per worker
- Personal referrer activity (so you can thank and reward them)
- Opportunities to boost your referral application, e.g. does adding pre-formatted email referral templates increase the amount of referrals?
You need to regularly review your referral app to see what’s working and what’s not.
Meritage Report on Tools Used for Employee Referral Programs
According to the Meritage report on tools used for employee referral programs, 50 percent of respondents used referral performance in their Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and 14% used a third party referral solution. An ATS can help monitor referrals, create reports, and create a referral portal that employees can access to look at their referral program rewards. For more information on Application Tracking Systems, take a peek at this article.
Third party systems usually concentrate on mapping project openings to employee social networks, which makes it effortless for workers to refer people they know. Some popular systems include Choozer, Great Job, Jobvite, TalentVine, Zao, and Zalp.
In addition to employing an ATS or third party referral tracking systems, you might also use your CRM or talent management applications to track referrals.
Bottom Line: How to Generate More Employee Referrals
Since worker referrals are such enormous part of an effective hiring program, it’s worth your time and money to make it as successful as possible.
If done correctly you should Find a number of advantages including:
- More candidates per introductory for fewer dollars
- Higher quality candidate pool
- Nominees that have better comprehension and perception of their firm coming in
- Candidates which are more likely to achieve success
- Hires that stay longer and tend to be more satisfied.
Ensure that your company produces a fantastic impression with known candidates right away by asserting your Really company page. Learn more here.
