Why is your employee referral program a failure?

Why do most employee referral programs fail to achieve success?

Your employees are your greatest source of outstanding talent!

Why are they not whispering in the ears of their former co-workers, associates, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances who can deliver the results you need?

In over 25 years of executive search, hiring and sourcing consulting, and implementing hiring process improvements in thousands of companies, we’ve discovered a few key differences in why some programs work and others fail miserably. Here’s a list of the key reasons employee referral programs fail to live up to their potential:

• Financial incentives don’t work
• Most companies do a terrible job communicating about an opening
• Employees don’t trust their referrals will be handled in a professional manner
• Classic networking methods are not usually applied to employees

Let’s take each one of these in turn and dissect it over our next 4 blog posts.

However, before we jump into how to improve your employee referral program, let’s talk about metrics of success in employee referral programs. Most companies we’ve encountered achieve somewhere between 5% and 20% as a target range on number of candidates hired who came through an employee referral. I’m going to suggest that your target should be 50%.

Over the next 12 months, 50% of all hires should come from employee (modify this to be stakeholder) referrals. Some of my clients that I’ve worked with over the last quarter of century have continually refined their employee/stakeholder referral program to the point where 75% or more of all hires come from a referral.

Employee/Stakeholder Referrals are one of the main elements of our Success Factor Methodology in using Success-based Sourcing Methods. We dig into this subject in much more detail in our award-winning book, You’re NOT the Person I Hired. We’ve posted examples of using Compelling Marketing Statements in your referral program in our FREE Resources (we’ll talk more about creating a compelling reason for employees to make referrals in a subsequent post).

We’ve even created a FREE Assessment to judge the effectiveness of your sourcing methods, including employee referrals. If you would like to take the FREE Assessment, please complete the application form on our website and we’’ll show you how to quickly and inexpensively improve your referral program.

Once you really focus on implementing best practices in employee referrals, you’ll see that your quality of hires goes up, employee satisfaction goes up, employee performance goes up, recruiting costs go down, the costs of bad hires goes down, time to find and select a top performer goes down.

When should be the best time for you to implement best practices in an employee referral program?

What would you consider to be the primary best practice in your company that generates an abundance of employee/stakeholder referrals?

Barry

Related posts:

1. Can’t Find People? They Are Hiding In Plain Sight – 3 Examples
2. When an “A” Candidate Isn’t an “A” Employee
3. Who Is Responsible For Hiring Top Talent In Your Company?