Irish employee referral programmes: doomed to fail?

Posted by: Krishna De | Posted on: February 28th, 2007 | 0 Comments | Posted in: Employer Branding, Ireland

Hiring great talent and building your success team for your professional services firm is critical for business growth. Probably more so than in any other business sector as you are so dependent on the capability of your people to deliver services to your clients.

In an increasingly competitive job market, many organisations are implementing employee referral programmes.

In other words, employee referral programmes reward your current employees for referring friends, family and people they know to be considered for open positions.

Your employees after all should be some of the strongest brand ambassadors for your business. Through their actions and word of mouth, your employees can support you in communicating to potential employees the strength of your employer brand.

Personally I have never been a great advocate of employee referral programmes as in my experience, they can lead to a lack of diversity. I’ve certainly worked in many organisations that were challenging to lead due to the deep routed connections going back in some cases generations.

A diverse workforce on the other hand is both healthy and makes good business sense for many reasons, including the fact that a diverse community can allow you to tap in to a diverse views which in itself can assist creativity and innovation.

But back to the subject of employee referral programmes.

A recent “Loyalty Survey” by IrishJobs.ie indicates that employee referral programmes may in fact be doomed to fail from the outset.

The IrishJobs.ie survey reported that 86% of the respondents feel the performance of a relative or friend working in their company is of high importance.

But looking further intothe feedback:

• only 53% of respondents to survey said they would actively recommend and encourage a friend qualified to do the job for a vacancy within their own company
• only 44% respondents to survey said they would actively recommend and encourage a friend qualified to do the job for a vacancy within their own company
• and 20% of respondents to the IrishJobs.ie Loyalty Survey said that they would not mention a job opportunity to relative that their relative is qualified for.

So it seems in Ireland that putting a lot of resources into developing and communicating your employee referral programme to attract great talent to your open vacancies is not going to bring you all the qualified applicants for your job that you might have expected.

Based on the Irishjobs.ie Loyalty Survey it appears that Irish employees probably want to keep their work environment and colleagues separate to their home environment, family and friends.

Do you have an employee referral progamme in your business and if so how effective has it been in helping you attract great talent?

Would you recommend a member of your family or a good friend to work in your company?

Data source: Onrec.com