Ever referred a friend while hiring is going on in your company? Maybe you would have done that at least once. Isn't it? And if you are the hiring team member, then you can get an idea that what a relief you get when you get a candidate referred from one of the employees. No doubt that the employee referral programs help you in saving time and make hiring simpler for you, but there are cases where the employee referral programs might fail due to certain hidden reasons.

According to a  white paper by LinkedIn, a majority of the hiring methods used by recruiters take 55 days to achieve the desired results while it takes only 29 days to hire a candidate who was referred by an employee.

Reason why your employee referral program might fail

Employee referral programs are indeed a good idea to hire candidates but are more like a half-minded plan. The process may seem easy and quick but it demands a lot of attention, planning, proper analysis, and then action. It might fail due to improper flow of information, no giving referral awards,  delayed response times, lack of transparency, or even ineffective administration. So, it's time to get aware of what an employee referral program exactly demands from you. Isn't it? Let's have a closer view then.

Ways to Make Your Employee Referral Program Successful

To hire the right talent at the right time for your organization, it becomes necessary that you adopt the basic principles while creating an employee referral program. Here are the top ways to make your employee referral program a successful one.

  1. Maintain transparency and clear communication: You need to make sure that your employees know exactly and entirely the requirements of the post you are hiring for. Clear and transparent communication is quite necessary if you are expecting the right candidates in return. Otherwise, be prepared to receive the unexpected results.
  2. Don’t complicate the referral process: Make sure that the employee referral program you create is not complex and is conveying the necessary information clearly. Just because every employee has his own duties and responsibilities, and if you fail to convey simple things, nobody is going to take out time and get through your program.
  3. Give extra priority to referrals: If an employee is taking out time to refer a candidate for your organization, it becomes your foremost priority to appreciate his efforts. You simply can't ignore the efforts they have put in. You need to give them rewards or some bonus in order to appreciate them and motivate other employees to become a part of the program.
  4. Educate your hiring team: You simply can't begin with an employee referral program in your organization. You need to take out time and sit with the entire hiring team, discuss the requirements, your hiring criteria, and other parameters before you go on to implement your referral program.
  5. Keep your referral program updated and fresh: It's quite obvious that if the policies of your employee referral program remain the same all over the time, the employees will lose interest in participating. Agree? So, you need to keep on changing the rewards or incentives you are offering to your candidates on a regular basis, either on a quarterly or on annual basis. So, make sure you update your policies timely to maintain employees interest in the program.

Wrapping Up

Adopting the above tactics will let you hit the right talent with fewer efforts and time. 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!