Referral program: how employee recommendations fill vacancies

Filling vacancies through employee recommendations is one of the most effective hiring channels. According to industry data, referred candidates deliver the highest funnel conversion, and a significant share of all vacancies is filled through referrals. Companies are increasingly launching referral programs and rewarding employees for successful candidates.

Why it works

• Reach. Each employee has about 150 contacts on social media and messengers on average, plus a phone book with years of accumulated connections. In a company of 200 people, that is a potential network of tens of thousands of candidates “one handshake away”.
• Quality at the entry point. An employee knows what the job involves and instinctively weighs up which of their acquaintances could handle it. Candidates enter the funnel already having passed the referrer's personal filter.
• Faster onboarding. Besides a mentor, the newcomer has a referrer they can easily ask things that would be awkward to ask the manager.
• Shared values. People recommend people like themselves — those who share the company's approach.
• Speed. A candidate trusts the recruiter more when they hear a friend's name; the referred candidate does not want to let their colleague down and makes an effort at every stage of selection.

How the referral program works in TopHR

• Any employee creates a recruitment requisition; it goes through approval and is assigned to a recruiter.
• The recruiter sees all their requisitions — in progress and in the queue. Referral programs are most often used to find salespeople, engineers, support specialists and marketers.
• The recruiter publishes the requisition in the active vacancies section.
• Every employee can recommend a friend and get a reward if the candidate starts work.
• The referral form is short: fill it in and send it to the recruiter.
• For each requisition, the recruiter sees both their own candidates and referred ones — referrals carry a separate flag.

After that — the common funnel

A referred candidate goes through the same stages as everyone else: review and approval by the manager, filling in the questionnaire via a link in their personal account, a security check, a job offer. The only differences are the “referral” flag and the reward to the referrer once the candidate is hired.