Employee Referral Best Practices That Actually Drive Results

Subscribe for updates

Get talent acquisition best practices, trends, and news delivered directly to your inbox.

By entering your email, you agree to receive marketing emails from JobScore

Employee referrals often result in a better quality of hire, faster time to hire, and reduced recruitment costs compared to other sourcing channels. But your team members won’t submit referrals if your program is too complicated, forgettable, and unrewarding.

A few strategic changes around how you structure and run your employee referral program can increase your team’s participation and the quality of candidates you receive. Let’s explore employee referral best practices to help you build a more successful program.

Communicate your referral program consistently

Out of sight means out of mind. Periodically communicate about your employee referral program to keep it top of mind with team members.

For example:

Introduce your referral program during onboarding. Include information about your referral program in onboarding materials and mention it specifically during your new hire’s first week. New employees are often your best referrers because they’re still closely connected to their previous workplaces and networks.
Alert your team members when a new role opens. Requesting employee referrals is one of the most impactful job distribution strategies. Smaller teams might send a dedicated communication for each job opening while larger teams may periodically send a round up of open roles.
Build referral awareness into your regular communication rhythm. Add a standing agenda item about open roles and referral opportunities to your all-hands meetings. Post your most urgent hiring needs in your team Slack or Microsoft Teams workspace weekly.
Share success stories. Let the whole company know when someone makes a successful referral. These stories serve two purposes: they remind people the program exists, and they provide social proof that referring actually leads to results.

Provide incentives that motivate your team members

There are many different ways to incentivize employee referrals — do what works best for your team. Just make sure your team members know exactly what they need to do to earn the incentive, what they’ll receive, and when they’ll receive it.

For example:

Consider a tiered approach based on role difficulty. Your standard referral bonus works fine for roles you fill regularly. But for hard-to-fill positions may warrant a bigger payout.
Time your payments strategically. Some organizations pay when the candidate is hired while others wait 90 days to ensure the new hire stays. There’s also a hybrid approach where partial payments are made at set milestones, such as the onsite interview, offer acceptance, and after the retention period. Delayed payments protect against quick turnover but can reduce the immediate motivation. Test both approaches to see what drives more participation from your team.
Don’t overlook non-monetary rewards. Public recognition, extra vacation days, charitable donations in your team member’s name, or experiences like concert tickets appeal to different motivators.

Make it easy for your team members to refer candidates

An effective referral process reduces friction for your team members so they’re more likely to submit candidates.

More than half of referrals (55%) come from email and another 30% come from a social share. Offer sample text your team members can send to their network connections — and make sure your job descriptions can be easily sent via email and social.

Create a simple referral form that allows your team members to submit candidates with a resume, LinkedIn profile, or basic contact information — whatever they have on hand. You might also ask your team member to provide a bit of context about their referral, such as how they know each other.

Hiring hack:

A mobile-friendly referral submission form ensures that your team members can refer candidates anytime, anywhere.

Respond to every referral quickly

Your team members will stop making referrals if you don’t treat their candidates with respect. It’s crucial to get back to candidates in a timely manner — and keep your team members in the loop so they know their candidate’s status.

Set a service level agreement to review and acknowledge every referral within 48 hours. Provide a realistic timeline for next steps — and follow up when you say you will.

Keep your team members informed as their referrals progress through the hiring process and provide them with feedback when candidates are rejected. This shows respect for employees who participate in your program and it trains them to refer better candidates in the future.

Build internal partnerships

Your team members have the connections, but you have the hiring expertise. Partner with your team members to help them uncover their most promising network connections.

This may include proactively sourcing your team members’ networks and asking for warm introductions. It can also include offering training sessions that help your team members learn to source and engage talent. When 8% of referrals never respond and another 1% decline, this can be an impactful way to drive results.

Provide resources like employer branding content, email templates, and general guidelines to encourage employee advocacy and boost referrals.

Track the right metrics

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Pick the metrics that matter most to you — and align with your goals.

For example, you could track referral performance through each stage of your hiring funnel. What percentage of referred candidates get phone screens? How many advance to final interviews? Where do referred candidates drop out compared to other sources?

You can also see who’s referring candidates and how far they’re moving through the process. Reward team members who have been generating great referrals and see what you can do to make other team members more active. And identify coaching opportunities to work with team members who refer candidates that don’t work out.

Use the right technology to manage your program

Spreadsheets and email inboxes can’t scale with a successful referral program. You need dedicated technology to track submissions, measure results, and keep the process organized once you start receiving more than a handful of referrals per month.

An applicant tracking system like JobScore helps you effectively manage employee referrals alongside all your other candidates:

Promote your employee referral program. A careers site and email campaigns help you keep team members up to date on job openings and referral incentives.
Enable quick job sharing. Integrated sharing tools enable team members to share open positions directly to their social networks or via email.
Customize referral submission forms. Ask for as much or as little information as you need to decide on next steps.
Send alerts when referrals are submitted. Your hiring team can receive instant notifications when referrals are submitted so they can respond promptly.
Respond to candidates quickly. Candidate scoring and email templates help you get back to referred candidates quickly.
Provide transparency to your team members. Allow your team members to see the status of their referred candidate.
Track successes. Improve your program and measure your ROI with referral reports.

Final thoughts on these employee referral best practices

Employee referral programs fail when organizations treat them as a passive sourcing channel that runs itself. They succeed when you make referring easy, communicate consistently, respond quickly, and recognize participation.

Start with one or two best practices from this list. Maybe you streamline your referral submission process and commit to responding to every submission within 48 hours. Or you implement better tracking and launch a targeted referral campaign for your most challenging role. Small improvements compound quickly.

Remember that referral programs require ongoing attention. Review your metrics monthly. Ask employees what would make them more likely to refer candidates. Test different incentive structures. Keep refining based on what actually drives results at your company.

Your team members already know talented people who’d be a great fit for your organization. Your job is simply to make it easy, rewarding, and visible for them to make those connections. Do that well, and you’ll build one of the most effective recruiting channels available to your company.