Referral recruiting sounds like a great idea: you’re looking to fill a new position, and where better to start looking for folks than through people you already know? The referrers can be employees at the hiring company, or simply people in the network of the recruiter or hiring manager.
In my experience, the outcome of referral recruiting can vary significantly based on the source, and their incentives for making the referral.
Starting with the ideal case, a hiring manager brings on someone with whom they’ve worked in the past. Often, these moves materialize as part of the “hidden” job market; no open position is ever posted, no resume changes hands, no position is formally “applied” for. The manager simply picks up the phone and “gets the band back together” by assembling top talent they’ve worked with in previous lives. While there are lots of reasons where this sort of move might not work out in the end, one factor that heavily favors a positive outcome is that the manager and recruit have worked with each other previously and choose to do so again, with the insight of knowing what they are getting into.
It is this ideal that forms the motivation for any sort of referral recruiting. There is a belief that since “A players tend to work with other A players”, that if I ask my employees (who are all A players, right?) or talented people in my network to recommend people for open positions, that the people whom they refer will naturally be talented as well.
Is this belief correct? Well…it depends. I was interviewing a seasoned recruiter recently, and asked him about A player referrals. His response, loosely paraphrased, was, “Do A players know other A players? Of course they do, but those other A players all currently have jobs and most aren’t looking for a new one. The problem is that A players also know their unemployed drinking buddy, or their just-laid-off college roommate… and more often than not, the A player you are talking to is more interested in helping their friend than they are in helping you connect with the most talented folks in their network.”
So where’s the gold in the gap between the idealized model for referral recruiting and the unemployed drinking buddy? It’s in the incentives or, more accurately, the potential for shared pain/opportunity. By this I don’t mean direct financial incentives, as in many employee referral programs that pay for a successful hire. I mean how much is your own professional success influenced by the placement of this candidate? For those 1-degree of separation positions (manager, peer, subordinate), no A player would refer anyone but the best, because they realize that their own career trajectory (and reputation) will be heavily influenced by any names they throw in the hat.
Recognize this, and apply it when considering referral recruiting. Targeting referrals from not just the most talented individuals, but those with the greatest incentives to provide access to the best talent in their networks, will greatly increase the likelihood of getting the desired inbound flow of A players.