Employee referrals: You love them, can’t live without them. I know, me too. I love it when a team member serves up a candidate who turns out to be a great fit for an open spot. Everybody wins – the company with a great addition, the employee with a fat referral bonus check and the new team member who found a good gig with someone they know.
Of course, here’s the dirty little secret. Lots of employee referrals are bad.
You know the referral source I’m talking about. The employee who refers everyone they know because they’re trying to be nice to their friends, or maybe they’re just trying to get paid. Like the employee who is on such a bad referral streak that you call him “Mr. 0 for 20″ because he’s referred 20 candidates, and not one of them sniffed a job. If you see a lead in again like “I met Janet at quarter draft night, and I think she’d be a great fit for us..,” you’re going postal.
That’s why when it comes to referrals, LinkedIn referrals are better overall than employee referrals.
The math and science of this comparison is pretty simple. Employees refer friends. LinkedIn contacts tend to refer people who do what they do for a living, because that’s the type of network they build out on LinkedIn. As a result, on average, LinkedIn referrals are much higher quality that employee referrals.
Of course, the work required to get to a hire in LinkedIn is a barrier to most HR people I know. It takes hard work – you’ve got to message a lot of people, because the response rate to your call for help won’t be sky high on LinkedIn. As a result, most HR pros with recruiting responsibilities never fully adopt to living the LinkedIn referral lifestyle.
So, you’d rather take what comes in the employee referral bucket and not grind away to market your openings to people you find in LinkedIn? That’s OK.
Lazy, but OK. Have fun sorting through the people Johnny met at the bar. Good luck with your hiring. I hope your post and pray, farmer-like recruiting goes really well.
That’s not quite the whole story, employee referrals are long past ‘just friends’. Not only recruiters have a large LinkedIn network, employees do invite professional colleagues more and more.
The thing with employee referrals is that an employee can be unfamiliar with the particulars of a job opening. Then an introduction will depent mostly on the cultural fit. But in a lot of organisations (like consultancy firms, law firms, accountancy, etc.) employees have a pretty good idea of what their collegaes are doing.
It’s an interesting question. One thing I am always cognizant of with employee referrals is that the more often we hire that way, the less diverse our workforce becomes. The key is learning who really makes good referrals based on the person’s work and then make sure you’re not just hiring the “same person” over and over from a cultural standpoint. Nice post KD.
Great post, Kris… you raise some excellent issues about how well employees typically know the people they refer. Mr. 0 for 20 – I think I supervised him in my last in-house role.
It’s about creating a healthy balance with the team. I’m always wary of too many family members added to the team as well. Why make the workplace more complicated than it needs to be? It never goes smoothly when you have to terminate your top performer’s wife.
Travailler est philosophie.C Une ‘est le moyen le plus sûr de sortir de soi même et d’Atteindre les buts les plus Elèves de l’Humanité. Alors les conditions du travail devraient être excellences.
The best employee referrals come in firms which (1) create cultural disincentives for poor/ill-informed referrals (e.g. employee referrals are included as goals and then results on performance reviews in many professional service firms), (2) provide sufficiently clear postings, not to mention KSAOC-based job and position descriptions for current staff, that employees have a fighting chance of understanding who might be a good fit and for what, and (3) the evaluation process for such referrals provides quick and clear feedback on what works and what doesn’t in terms of the referral’s fit to the posting. When these factors are in place, along with the appropriate incentives, employee referral programs can be very effective. With respect to LinkedIn, it’s obvious that some folks are particular about with whom they are willing to connect while others are connection-obsessed. I find LinkedIn is an excellent resource for identifying people with putative KSAOCs but that broader online research is needed to go from a trolling LinkedIn sweep to a refined list of likely candidates. The best part about using LinkeIn when I’m trying to help a client recruit scarce KSAOCs is that there’s usually no more than one degree of separation between a person of interest which gives me someone I really know with whom to speak directly and candidly about that person.