Did you ever refer any of your friends to join your company? We all do that generally. Isn't it? And being an HR, it is such a relief when you get employee reference because it reduces half of your burden while hiring that candidate.

No doubt employee referral programs are the most efficient and cost-effective methods to hire a talented candidate for your organization. The plus point of employee referral programs is that the candidate has a better understanding of the job and the company too. Moreover, the referred people are more stable as compared to the other candidates.

Why do some employee referral programs fail?

Employee referral programs are indeed a good idea, but they are more like a half-minded plan. It might seem easy, but the process demands a deep planning, thorough analysis, and proper execution while hiring the referred candidate. There are certain major reasons which might end up in bad employee referral programs. Want to know how? Here are the top reasons which lead to the failure of employee referral programs.

Top reasons for failure

  1. Improper Information Flow: As an HR, ita your prime duty to keep all the existing employees aware about the current openings. You need to share the details with them, only then will they be able to refer somebody for the post. You might use automated tools for sharing or send monthly emails to the employees regarding the job openings.
  2. Change Referral Rewards: Sticking to the same referral reward for a long time will no more seem interesting to your employees. You must keep on changing and updating the reward to keep the employees motivated and interested in the referral programs.
  3. You Fail to Respond to Referrals on time: WIthin how much time you respond to your referred candidates leaves an impact on them. A late response puts a bad impression and the candidate might lose interest while he waits for a response from your organization.
  4. Your Site Isn’t Mobile-Optimized: If your website isn't mobile optimized, then get ready for fewer candidates engagement on your website. All the candidates are seeking for jobs on their smartphones and if you miss that, you might lose the candidate.
  5. Excluding Some Employees From the Program: It could be that you are excluding certain departments or employees while sharing the referral program and policy. Like you might not count the project managers, or HR team while sharing the details. This is a bad idea, you must share the policy with all of them.
  6. Ineffective administration: Is your hiring team taking quite a long time while responding, are they managing records in a complex format and on spreadsheets? These type of issues indicate that your administration needs to be reviewed and changed accordingly. It needs to be more systematic, structured, and productive.
  7. Lack of transparency: While defining the referral policy to your existing employees, did you made the things clear and are they easy to understand? You need to focus on this and build a clear and easy flow of data to your employees.

How jiTalent can help you?

Preparing the employee referral programs might become simple if you consider the above strategies thoroughly. Moreover, there are certain software which can help you in making your hiring process more easy and simple. jiTalent is one such software which can help you to automate your recruitment process and streamline the daily HR tasks while you prepare the employee referral programs. As the data gets managed over an automated platform, it becomes easy for you to carry out the hassle-free hiring of candidates.  Still have any questions? Feel free to get in touch with us at any time. Our team would be glad to hear from you!