Analytic Flavoured Referrals Program

Employee Referral program, in which inviting your own employees to help you in filling your next talent requirement is undoubtedly the best approach.

Referrals are indeed a gold mine, which is completely based on the mutual trust. It will full fill your need by giving you perfect matches for your exact requirement. Apart from, Referrals being the quickest and the fastest way to close your hiring need, studies have also shown that referrals causes for a higher retention rate. This is the most economical and the cost effective approach too.

But, the questions we need answers are:


Q) How much do we really see Referrals as a Gold mine?

The ultimate success of your referrals program is not just finding CVs, but the CVs of quality applicants who are so passionate to join you. Your company has the biggest assets in spreading about you and finding you what you need.

Q) How much have we gone beyond sending email notifications?

Your people have different priorities and this email has a higher probability that this email would continue to stay under “unread emails”

Q) Is your Referrals program properly planned? Or is it just limit to a rewarding mechanism that stays in corporate policies and that is all?

The talent requirements are so dynamic and you will not definitely get quality time for proper planning. Most of the time, approaching towards ad-hoc activities will be your easiest and quickest savior. And there is a high probability that, most of your recent employees are not aware of the existence of a rewarding mechanism.

Following will help you to have a good to Great Referral program for your company.

“No pain, No Gain” or “if you need to have something you never had, you need to do something, you have never done”, even though authors are unknown, if you are ready to a bit of hard work, you will be surely having some benefits from Referrals.

Properly planned Campaigns

There will be no audience, like your ex-employees, ex-interns, existing employees and also fans to get you what you need. They know you and they know exactly what you need. Your audience is very much diversified and the chances are very much higher that they ready to help you. So, don’t think twice, before jumping them and ask for help.

Get your audience segmented in to proper sections. You should be able to find suitable champions to lead each and every segments. You will get astounding results, if you could pick a champion of whom, his/her voice will be heard from the members of that segment. 

The easiest would be to contact your audience via the segment champions in one to one basis. You need to request your IT department to come up with a tracking mechanism so that, you will be able to measure the effectiveness among your campaigns of getting your Pool of CVs increased with quality CVs.

Figure 1. Effectiveness of Referral Campaigns

Measure the effectiveness

Get your Referral Graph done for all the employees in your company. You can either make this available for everyone or can keep this information restricted to your management and leadership teams. (It is up to you)

There will be a very high probability of getting more CVs from those who having a connection in referral graph, and targeting them first, will give make you feel motivating as the recruitment manager.

This graph could even be used to show your engagement strength of your ex-employees. The more referrals you get from the red circles below shows their willingness to help you even after they have left you. 

Try to keep this details up to date, so that you will have a complete picture of referrals. Have different colors to make different sources identifiable. 

If the sources can be properly identified, you will be able to measure the effectiveness for the Referral sources as well.

Figure 2. Referral Graph

It is always better to keep the nodes with real names.

Contribution Matrix

Rather than the details of the employees contributing to this program, the employees, who not contributing should be your biggest concern. You should reach those employees. Because, we live in a connected world in which if someone says he/she cannot find a good referral, it will be questionable.

Figure 3. Employee-Referral Contribution Matrix

Motivation via Gamification

The number one demotivating factor in all the referral programs is not providing the quick feedback. And also delays in informing your immediate needs.

Focus on a leader board similar to the followings. Have a simple logic to calculate the rank of your employees in forwarding the CVs.

Make sure to have the visibility of showing all the factors dependent on determining the rank and how others have contributed. (E.g. Number of CVs forwarded, Success %, Average duration, etc...)

Figure 4. Live Notifications & Leader Board

You should have your interview system properly automated so that. You will be able to dig through the statuses and see more insight information.

Happy Referrals !!!