Four academic professionals recently published an exhaustive research paper on Employee Referrals. The paper makes an incredibly strong case for employee referral programs and uses data-driven thinking to illustrate this. Using unique personnel data from nine large firms in three industries, the researchers document five consistent facts about hiring through employee referral networks:
- Referred applicants are more likely to be hired, more likely to accept job offers, and have higher pre-job assessment scores.
- Referred workers have similar skill characteristics to non-referred workers.
- Referred workers are less likely to quit and are more productive, but only on rare high-impact performance metrics; on most standard non-rare performance metrics, referred and non-referred workers perform similarly.
- Referred workers have slightly higher wages, but yield substantially higher profits per worker.
- Workers who make referrals have higher productivity than others, are less likely to quit after making a referral, and refer those like themselves on particular productivity metrics.
This is further validation that Employee Referral Programs could be the most effective strategy for hiring for your organization. Contact us to schedule a demo of our referral program management software and see how you can turbo-charge your referral hiring.