Do You Know What Employees Think Of Employee Referral Programs?

By Author: Savio Vadakkan
Total Articles: 58
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Whether your employee referral program succeeds or fails is driven to a great extent by how it is perceived by employees and their ability to market the company sufficiently well to potential candidates.

The perception that employees have regarding the employee referral program is largely a function of the overall experience that the HR and Recruitment teams are able to provide to employees during the entire employee referral process.

Well-executed employee referral programs are able to motivate employees to leverage their social and professional capital to help the company recruit colleagues and friends to share a common work experience. Incase the work experience is not all that great, the referral program needs to work that much harder to create an experience that still motivates an employee to refer people.

The core objective of any good employee `referral program is to convert the workforce into self-driven headhunters. To be able to achieve this objective companies need to give careful consideration to any and all of the potential interaction points between the employee and recruiting point of contact ...
... to ensure a compelling experience for the employee. Organizations need to analyze questions like

• What are employees expecting from the interaction?

• What is the kind of perception that the organization would like to create through this interaction

• What is the likely employee perception going to be if the interaction is handled this way

• Is there any better way to manage the interaction to create a more positive perception

Planning well for responses to these and more such questions will help the company deliver an experience that will compel employees to share their superlative experience with others through online and offline platforms creating an automatic pull factor for the organization.

The first step while planning the employee experience is to break it down into subparts or what is referred to as moments of truth in customer service parlance. These moments of truth define and determine the overall perception of employees regarding the employee referral program.

A good starting point while designing the employee referral program is to find out what employees think about the overall experience of working in the organization in general and employee referral program in particular. Ask questions like;

• What was the primary factor that made them choose your organization to work for?

• What are the positives perceived by them about working for your organization?

• What are some of the things they would like to see changed?

• What are some of the positive about interaction with your manager?

• What are the main characteristics of your job that you would like to highlight to others?

• How many of your referrals have been successfully hired till date?

• What have been the major roadblocks while referring people for open positions?

Answers to these and more questions will help you design an employee referral program that is in line with how the organization wants the referral program to be perceived and how it is actually perceived by employees, a good way to ensure success of your program.

Author Bio:

Savio Vadakkan is the Marketing Professional at ZALP, a unique employee referrals booster. ZALP helps organizations tap the full potential of their Well-executed employee referral programs using advanced employee referral, referral program is to convert the workforce into self-driven headhunters and interesting features like gamification.