Questioning Value of Employee-Referral Programs — and Improving Them
Many recruiters or HR professionals say their employee referral programs are their best source of the best candidates.
Peter Weddle, in the Wall Street Journal, begs to differ.
After his rundown of benefits and criticisms of existing referral programs, he provides some interesting suggestions for a better approach to recruiting passive candidates through personal relationships with existing employees.
So, how should employee referral programs change? In my view, they must shift from a de facto program for family and friends to an explicit program of talent scouting.In other words, organizations should ask their employees to refer the best people in their field, even if they don’t know them personally, and then reward those employees when the top performers are identified as a fit for a specific opening in the organization and subsequently recruited and successfully hired.
This talent scouting approach to employee referral is already in place at Eli Lilly and Company. According to a report from the Recruiting Roundtable, this pharma company uses a three-pronged strategy
Good ideas. Just don’t neglect the other side of this recruiting-passive-candidates trend: retention.
Otherwise you may be taking “one step forward and two steps back,” as competitors use similar techniques to entice your best employees, creating a revolving door that in the long run may not be efficient or beneficial to anyone (then again, it might be, as a more free labor market with better information leads to overall better efficiency in the allocation of resources — what do you think?)
“What’s Wrong With Employee-Referral Programs?” by Peter D. Weddle (WSJ CareerJournal)
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