If you are a jobseeker, you would be foolish to seek a job without doing everything in your power to get referred by an employee or customer or even friend of someone at the hiring company. This insistent advice derives from the fact that referred candidates are nearly two orders of magnitude more likely to be hired than non-referred candidates. Avoid getting a referral, it would seem, and remain unemployed.

If you are an employer, you will be aware of the enormous advantage given to referral candidates and might therefore conclude that you MUST have a referral program. So you learn about best practices in such programs and quickly adopt one or modify the one you have. Because… apparently, referral candidates are “better”. But maybe you should confirm that.!? You hunt and you find research suggesting that: referral candidates are slightly better (about 3% better) than the rest. Why is that? Perhaps because the vast majority of referrers naturally avoid referring obviously inappropriate candidates while the non-referring hiring system at least occasionally lets them through.

Think about it. If you are an employer and are hunting for quality hires, people who will be strong performers – and that’s exactly what you should be doing – why would you possibly think that the best place to look is among the people that your employees (and customers, etc) HAPPEN to know? Even the most amazing networking maven will know a very, very tiny fraction of the people who could be potentially great candidates. Why would we limit ourselves to such a miniscule sample size?

There are reasons. We will discuss them in this webinar. We will also address the causes of the referrals-are-the-answer fad, and explore whether there might actually be better ways to select the most likely high performers.

06/12/2012 3:00 pm o'clock

06/12/2012 4:00 pm o'clock

Paul Basile

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