Out of good intentions, organisations put out a referral process. While this seems fairly simple and easy, it is definitely a road to disaster. Let me reason it.
1) Hard to communicate open jobs - The employees are unaware about the open requirements that are currently enabled, which means recruitment teams will have to create colorful emails with lot of text describing job descriptions
2) Unable to validate profiles - Anytime an employee receives a resume from a friend, all they do is forward it to the recruiters. They do not validate the profile as they are completely unaware whether there’s an opening in the organisation matching his/her friend’s skillset. Also, segmenting candidates becomes very difficult through the mailbox as you do not know whether the profile you had received has a particular job or not
3) Recruiters have to process 3X more - A mailbox is a processing nightmare. The effort that a recruiter has to put in terms of identifying the right candidates for the right jobs is just too high
4) Lack of status updates to the employees - Keeping your employees informed about their friend’s status is nearly impossible through this channel. The mailbox becomes a repository of not just resumes but also queries from employees on how do they refer, escalations on bonus queries or status updates of their friends, etc. Ultimately, having the mailbox gives the employee an illusion that there’s a full fledged program and sets up expectations. They assume that the program might have subsequent parts to provide status updates, tracking, rewards, etc.
5) Mailbox is a pain for employer branding - A mailbox does not give you the ability to do employer branding. It is internal focussed, which means there’s no easy way for an employee to go out to their community and say ‘My company is a great place to work for and these are the open jobs, please join us’
A good referral program needs three parts of a triangle to succeed. It requires employees to be engaged, right candidates to participate against the right job. When met, it drives the magical conversion resulting in a successful employee referral program. A mailbox puts too much of an onus on the recruitment team - to figure out the right profiles, analyse whether its a right demand and check if the candidates are even eligible for the requirement. All in all a mailbox is a black box.
Invest in a good referral system today. It reduces the nightmare and processing efforts for recruiting teams. Also, it easily pays for within your recruiting budget itself.
Let us know your experiences with the referral mailbox and things that you’ve tried to make the experience better.