Useful Tips on Creating Employee Referral Programs

Employee Referral programs can do wonders for a business as long as the company has a great employer brand.

Dropbox was founded in 2008. It now boasts over 300 million users. This growth is backed up by a $10 billion valuation because it uses a clever referral and social sharing reward marketing strategy.

Instead of advertising their product, Dropbox rewards users with extra storage when they refer friends.

Referrals are a huge benefit to any business, just ask the luminary marketer, John Jantsch.

Here are a few tips for creating a successful referral program for your pipeline.

Allow More of the Right People to Make Referrals

• Be creative with who can provide referral leads
• Allow referrers – whether internal, non-employee or recruiters – to refer outside of their own areas of expertise.
• Enlist clients, retired employees, and other stakeholders to refer leads.

Have different processes for Referred Candidates

• Rather than have all candidates handled by the same system, put referred leads in the fast lane for processing and evaluation.
• Make sure you let the referrer know you and what the status of their referral is – whether positive or negative.
• Provide the referrer with feedback on what made a good or otherwise lead so learning and refinement can take place.

Vary Reward Structures

• Dan Pink, author of Drive wrote: Humans respond to benefits as well as monetary again.
• Relate how good referrals strengthen a company’s prospects, underpinning job security company performance.
• Acknowledge and recognise a good referral via internal and external social sites, thank you notes, a special meal at a restaurant or via the company site.
• Set goals for team referrals. Create targets for the volume of referrals from given teams.

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About the author:

Greg Weiss is the Founder of CareerSupport365. He has almost 30 years success in HR and in career coaching people.