At Drafted, we get to talk to companies about their employee referral programs every day, and our focus is to help them unlock the power of their company network.
It’s conventional wisdom that employee referrals are like gold when you’re mining talent. To manage a successful referral program, there are many tactical pieces involved. We often get asked questions about employee referral programs and we've noticed a lot of recruiting team have the same challenges.
Companies often ask our team things like:
To help answer some of these questions, we surveyed and compiled data from over 200 companies in 2020. I’ll give you some of the insights here, and we’re making our full report available to download for free.
To understand this, we looked at the % of hires through referrals across small, midsize, and large organizations. For example, if you hire 10 people in a year and 3 of them come through referrals, your referral hire percentage is 30%
We found that the median across all sizes, regardless of ATS, was in the same ballpark - 25% to 30%.
1 out of 10 companies reported having some kind of non-cash reward as part of their referral program.
Examples of rewards included charity donations, paid trips, and even company stock options. To see more kinds of rewards you can check out our full list in the report.
We found that 25% of organizations are either experimenting with or offering an external referral reward. Typically, external referral rewards were lower than normal employee referral rewards.
The difference in rewards was typically driven either because of a lower conversion to hire rate, or for simplicity of managing the payouts and tax implications in various geographies.
We found that the median percentage of hires through referrals was 27% and best in class was 44%. You can use these as benchmarks to measure how your referral program is performing.
You can find more insights and get the full report here.
Our mission is to build powerful referral programs by connecting people through their network. Someone already knows your next great hire, we want to help you find them.
At Drafted, we believe that your company network is your biggest competitive advantage when it comes to building best-in-class referral programs. By using the power of your company network, we make it easy for you to leverage referrals to find and hire the best candidates. Companies that use Drafted to build their referral programs 2x their employee referrals and diversify their talent pool through community referrals.