If your employee referral process is different for every candidate, implement a formal program to make sure all referrals have the best experience with your company and you don’t lose great candidates, due to fragmented processes. A formalized referral program can reduce overall costs-per-hire, speed up the sourcing process and increase employee engagement. Here are six ways to overcome challenges with your existing employee referral program.

Challenge #1

Your current referral process is manual, and the talent acquisition team tracks all referred candidates in a spreadsheet.

  • Streamlining solution: Use referral technology. Invest in referral technology that integrates with your existing ATS, to source and hire top talent within employees’ networks. Referral technology enables your workforce to seamlessly refer top candidates in their networks directly to your open positions, eliminating spreadsheets and manual processes

Challenge #2

Employees have no idea who to refer candidates to; some referrals go to the hiring manager, others to department heads and others to the recruiting team.

  • Streamlining solution: Make it easy for employees to refer candidates. Don’t let confusion deter employees from referring top candidates. Ensure employees know exactly how to refer someone and the steps required to submit a referral. Hold referral training sessions for new hires and quarterly refresher courses for current employees; share information on your company’s referral process in break/lunch rooms, on the intranet and in internal newsletters, to further reinforce the process.

Challenge #3

Your referral process is the the same for every country in which you have a presence.

  • Streamlining solution: Ensure global compliance. For multinational companies, the rules around candidate referrals differ drastically between nations. Lack of structure surrounding employee referrals can result in compliance issues. Use referral technology to mitigate legal risks associated with stringent global employee referral policies.

Challenge #4

Employees are sharing jobs with their social networks, but you have little control over the jobs they are sharing and you can’t track the referrals who are a result of these efforts.

  • Streamlining solution: Enable easy social sharing. If employees are currently sharing open jobs with their social networks, you are already halfway there. Make it even easier for them to share your highest priority open positions with their social media networks; send out a weekly hot jobs email that includes suggested copy for your employees to include in their social outreach. Further elevate easy social sharing by using referral software that automatically generates a social sharing link unique to each individual employee. This allows employees to share open jobs with their networks and be rewarded for candidates who were hired as a result of the process.

Challenge #5

Your company offers referral incentives indiscriminately. Without clear guidelines, reward distribution is haphazard and unknown.

  • Streamlining solution: Create a tiered incentive structure. Clearly communicate incentive structure to employees and set appropriate expectations as to when referring employees can receive their reward. Reward employees for referring candidates at every stage of the interview process. Regularly communicate this structure internally to motivate employees to more seriously consider referring candidates in their networks. Use referral technology that calculates rewards, so employees can observe accumulation over time, without hassling your HR and payroll teams.

Challenge #6

Your hiring process gets bogged down with multiple requests from employees who want to hear updates on their referrals.

  • Streamlining solution: Automate employee referral updates. Leverage recruitment software to remove the talent acquisition team from the communication process. Provide employees with the tools to access a referral portal that illustrates where their referrals stand in the interview process. This gives them easy to access insight while helping your team focus more on recruiting and less on internal updates.