Employee referral program templates that fast-track your program
Employee referral program templates can be a game-changer for your brand. Learn more about what they are and why you need them.
Key takeaways
An employee referral program template helps you set goals for your program, plan out how it should run, and strategize how you'll reward employees and promote your program.
Decide whether you need a template for new hiring referrals, or new customer referrals from employees; each requires a different framework.
When the program is live, check back on the template you’ve prepared so you know if it’s working the way you wanted. You can always go back to the drawing board and review your action steps to identify problems if you didn’t get the results you were expecting.
Employee referral programs are the perfect way to grow your business by leveraging your greatest assets. But setting up your first employee referral program can be overwhelming if you don’t know how to start and what you should be including. Fortunately, using an employee referral program template can help!
In this article, we’ll answer these questions:
What is an employee referral program?
What is an employee referral program template?
What does an employee referral program template help you accomplish?
Which employee referral program template is right for your needs?
What to include in an employee referral program template when employees refer employees?
What to include in an employee referral program template when employees refer customers?
How to choose the right software for your employee referral program template?
We will also share downloadable employee referral program sample templates, which you can use as is or customize for your individual needs.
What does an employee referral program template help you accomplish?
An employee referral program template is a framework that you can use to:
Plan out all aspects of your employee referral program before you launch
The template should cover aspects such as goals, systems, processes, people, and metrics.
Goals help you decide the steps you need to take to achieve specific results. Before you go about building a program, you want to have clear goals on hand to focus on.
Systems is about the software or programs you’ll need to create and run your program. If you’re a small business, you may be tempted to go down the manual route, but things can get complicated and complex in the absence of automation.
Processes are the different tasks involved in creating an employee referral program. You can have one process for recruiting employee referrers, another process for training, one process for tracking commissions, and another for initiating payments.
With the people component, you’re thinking about who needs to be in the loop and accountable for specific parts of the program. If you’re doing an employee-to-employee program, you’ll want to include your talent acquisition or HR teams. If you’re using a program to find new customers, you’ll likely need to talk to your sales and marketing teams. Either way, you may need to include your accounts team for the payments made to employees.
Last but not least, metrics is about how you will measure your goals and manage your performance.
In a sense, the planning process is about creating a bird’s eye view of everything you need to launch a successful employee referral program.
Create an action plan
Once you’ve established a baseline with your planning, you can go further with your framework by delving into the specific details of each aspect. At this stage, you’re developing the concrete steps to make your program a reality. Ask yourself these questions to help kickstart the process:
What specific goals do you want to achieve with the program? Do you want “x” number of new customers, or “x” value in new sales? Or, do you want to fill “y” number of positions by a fixed timeframe?
What types of employee referral bonuses or rewards do you want to give out, and how will these be paid to the referring employees?
What parts of the program should run automatically in the background?
Is there any process that needs to be routed to approvers before they can pass on to the next stages?
What engagement strategies can you use to ensure your program is consistently on peoples’ minds?
When the program is live, check back on the template you’ve prepared so you know if it’s working the way you wanted. You can always go back to the drawing board and review your action steps to identify problems if you didn’t get the results you were expecting.
Which employee referral program template is right for your needs?
Employee-to-employee or employee-to-customer: what type of employee referral program template will work best for your business? Or, are you ready to use both? Here’s how to figure out which template you’ll need.
Although some aspects of employee referral programs are similar across both templates, employee-to-employee and employee-to-customer referral programs each require a distinct template for planning.
An employee-to-employee referral program template will work for you if:
You’re actively looking for employees to fill job openings. If you’re frequently sharing your job postings through online channels (the career pages of your website, social media like Facebook, professional networking sites like LinkedIn, etc.), and offline channels (job boards and posters), an employee-to-employee program is a great tool.
Your company is fairly large. While a program like this can work just as well for a small-sized company, you may not need to have a program of this magnitude when you’re just starting out. It’s more ideal for the growth stage when you have the resources to handle the larger influx of responses and applicants you’ll be receiving.
Your employees are engaged, satisfied, and familiar with your brand and company culture. Your employees will only encourage other potential candidates to sign up if they’re genuinely vested in your business. If you take the time to develop rapport with your employees and make sure they’re happy working for your brand, you’re more than likely to succeed with an employee-to-employee referral program.
Employees know what you’re looking for in an ideal employee. To some extent, your employees will have some familiarity with how your company works on the inside and what candidates can expect in terms of company culture.
At the same time, you still need to spell out your expectations so your referring employees know what specific traits, experience, and capabilities they should be looking out for.
An employee-to-customer referral program template will work for you if:
You want your employees to be brand advocates and share your products and services. Your employees know your brand like no one else. And potential customers are more likely to trust employee sentiments over any form of direct brand advertising.
Your employees are engaged, satisfied, and familiar with your brand, products, and services. Similar to employee-to-employee referral programs, it’s absolutely essential that your employees are vested in your brand.
Spend time developing internal programs and policies that engage your employees and ensure they’re having the best possible experience as an employee. Another core business benefit (besides referrals) is that your retention rates are more consistent.
Employees know what you’re looking for in an ideal customer. While they know how your brand works from the inside, they may not necessarily have the knowledge or skills to identify the right-fit customers for your business. Provide training and resources so employees know what they’re looking for.
You are ready to handle a big influx of new customers. Once you start any form of referral marketing program, things can go viral very quickly. You want to ensure that every single customer has the best possible experience. Make sure you have enough staffing, resources, and tech support.
You provide stellar customer service. All your best-laid plans can go to waste if your customer service is sub-par. Having adequate resources can help mitigate much of the risks, but you still want to ensure your staff have the training and support they need to do a great job when they’re serving customers.
Next, we’ll be covering all the specific details of what you should cover in each type of program template. We’ll also share employee referral program sample templates that you can build on to craft your own templates.
Employee referral program template: What to include when employees refer employees
Planning on mobilizing employees to bring in job candidates? Use our guide to create your program framework. Your employee referral program policy template should include elements such as an overview, goals, tracking and software, rewards, eligibility, marketing, and training and development.
Now, let’s look at the details of the specific sections you should include, one by one.
1. Overview
The overview is your snapshot of what’s to come in the employee referral program template.
Cover the “why” for your program and when you want it to start (the launch date). You’ll also want to list and briefly describe all the individual elements you want to have ready before the launch.
2. Goals for your program
The first critical element of your employee referral program template is defining your goals. Goals can differ from business to business. But, in general, you may want to fill “x” number of roles in “y” department by a given date, or you may have several specific roles to hire for. If you have a larger organization, you may want to expand the scope to how many positions you want to fill by a specific date.
Within the context of the big-picture goals, you can get as specific and as detailed as you want. So you can list the types of qualifications candidates need to become eligible for applying. You can list the recruitment process stage-by-stage. You can even list the people who need to be part of the hiring process for different departments, for example, the hiring managers of the department and the human resources (HR) teams.
3. Tracking and software
The next element involves software and how you will leverage it to track the referrals your employees make. Granted, you can use spreadsheets, but this can get complicated very quickly when you start to scale. Ideally, you want a “set up and run automatically” type of solution – automation software. This type of software can execute all the tasks seamlessly, and a lot faster, in the background for you.
The best automation software you can use for this purpose is employee referral software. The software generates unique trackable referral links for each employee to share, and enables referral tracking in real time.
Look for the following features in a robust employee referral software program:
The software should be able to completely automate referral tracking, the sending of rewards, and even program promotion.
The software should make it easy for you to customize the program to your needs. You should also be able easily integrate it with your existing processes. Otherwise, you may find that you need to go back and forth between multiple systems.
It’s worth considering a software that’s flexible enough to run both programs (where employees refer employees and where employees refer customers). You may want to have this option if you plan to grow and scale further down the line, so there’s minimal disruption.
4. Rewards
Rewards are the most critical aspect of your employee-to-employee referral program. Your rewards scheme can make or break the process for your employees. An effective rewards scheme will also be highly motivating for your employees, so they’ll consistently be scouting for quality candidates for you.
Some questions you want to consider:
When do employees become eligible for rewards?
Will you pay the incentive right after a referred job candidate is accepted? Or after a set period of time following the hire?
Paying out an incentive as soon as a candidate gets hired may not always be your best option. What if you decide that a referred candidate is not the best fit? Or what if a candidate gets hired, but then resigns within a week?
Instead, you might decide to pay the referral bonus 60 or 90 days after the candidate’s start date, if the candidate is still deemed a successful hire. This method also serves to motivate your referring employees to ensure they’re bringing on qualified candidates that will potentially stay for the long haul.
Another way to offer rewards is to use a tiered reward structure. This means offering a small reward when a candidate completes a job application, another reward if the candidate gets through to the interview stage, and then finally, a much bigger reward if the candidate gets selected.
Or, you might decide to reward your referring employee when a new employee is hired, and then hand out additional bonuses further down the line once you’ve determined that there’s a long-term future with the new hire.
What rewards will you give out?
Whatever the type of reward you use, it’s important to make sure they’re rewards that your employees will find motivating and be happy to receive. Cash is a universal favorite and can often be the first preference for most of your employees.
But there are lots more options than just cash. You can also give rewards like gift cards, event tickets, or travel benefits, or offer training/skill development opportunities. You can even award more tangible gifts like gadgets, bags, or watches.
If you’re unsure what to pick, simply ask your employees what types of rewards they would find the most motivating and enjoyable to receive.
Will you gamify your program, with extra rewards for the top referrers of the year?
One idea worth looking into is gamification. That’s when you apply the same design used in games to motivate your own employees. Consider creating leader-boards, and providing higher-value rewards for the top referrers of the year.
5. Terms and eligibility
In this template section, you’ll make it clear who’s eligible to participate in the employee referral program and gain rewards, and who’s not.
Typically, all employees can submit referrals, with the exception of HR teams and senior executives.
As a standard, hiring managers also can’t submit referrals for the positions who would report to them, but can submit referrals for other positions.
Think about whether you want to include part-time employees and contractors in the referral program.
Once you’ve determined employee eligibility, it’s time to look at candidate eligibility.
Ask yourself whether you want to open up all the roles indiscriminately to the referral program – will any successful employee referral earn rewards?
Alternatively, you can only give out rewards for hard-to-fill roles. Also, think about the category of potential employees that’s relevant to the program. Should candidates be referred to full-time positions, non-temporary positions, or non-contract employee positions for the existing employee to qualify for rewards?
You can also go into more detail to tighten the eligibility criteria and make the rules more clear.
For example, must candidates be new applicants who haven’t applied in a year? What happens when a candidate is referred by multiple employees – do you want to reward the first referrer?
You can also provide information on how employees can identify the ideal candidates in terms of qualities, skills, and experience for the position.
6. How the referral process works
This element delves deeply into the finer details of how the referral process actually works from a practical perspective.
Discuss how employees can submit referrals. Is there a specific portal or referral form they should use?
List the specific information you want employees to provide when they’re referring candidates. For example, this could include the candidate name, position name, job ID number and contact information, referrer name/staff ID, referrer email address, and contact information.
Also, list the many ways employees can promote their referral links. Will they be given a shareable link that they can share directly to their social media channels? Will they send a direct email? An excellent solution that’s made possible through the use of referral software is creating unique trackable links for each referring employee, which they can share anywhere.
Last but not least, do you want to provide a message template that employees can personalize? Or, do you want to leave the messaging to the employees themselves? If you would rather have employees share the way they see fit, provide guidelines on specific do’s and don’ts.
7. Program promotion
Once you’ve established the foundational elements of your program, you next want to think about how you’ll promote it to your employees. Here are a few different channels you could consider:
Slack or other internal messaging forums
Inside employee portals
At company meetings
Via email
During one-on-one conversations
8. How to brief employees about the program
The importance of training cannot be over-emphasized. Training helps employees understand how they can go about achieving the objectives. It also serves as a support system so employees have concrete guidelines and instructions to fall back on. Discuss the following as part of your training and briefing programs:
How to identify the ideal candidate: What specific traits, skills, and experience should they have?
What types of candidates should NOT be referred?
Discuss open job descriptions in depth.
People from different departments may not be as clear on the essentials needed for a given job.
Clear up ambiguities and explain complex or technical terms.
Educate employees on how to avoid referral bias, also known as unconscious bias. Referral bias occurs when they (knowingly or unconsciously) exclude specific races, genders, or personality types from their referral preferences.
People have a propensity to work with people who are most like them. Training can help them become more logical and focused on choosing the right candidate for the job.
Train employees on how to use the referral program and track the status of their referrals.
It’s basic tech but training can be highly appreciated.
Training will also reduce the amount of questions about how the program works at the back-end, which you would otherwise end up having to field later.
9. How you’ll communicate with employees
The final element has to do with communication and engagement. With referral program software, you’ll be able to carry out many of these key tasks without missing a beat:
Keep employees updated on the status of their referrals via the referral platform.
Send out updates periodically, so employees know all the latest promotions and any changes they need to be aware of with respect to the program.
Solicit feedback on how employees are finding the program and what you can do to make things better or more effective. Software also makes it easy for employees to reach out to you via an online form, for example, with any questions they may have about the program.
You can also provide feedback to individual employees about the strengths and weaknesses of their referrals, so they know what they can do better for their next referrals.
Employee referral program template: What to include when employees refer customers
Planning on mobilizing employees as advocates who promote your products? This is the employee referral program template for you. You’ll need an overview, your specific goals, tracking and software notes, the rewards structure, eligibility criteria, how the referral process will work, promotion plans, training ideas, and a communication framework on your program template.
Last updated