There's two realities when it comes to Employee Referral Programs in most of our companies:

1.  It's widely accepted that one of the best sources of hire is the employee referral.

2.  HR pros market and position their Employee Referral Programs more like ACME than Apple.  We're not effective marketers for the most part, and it shows in the results of our employee referral programs.

It's the marketing piece that's key to Employee Referral Programs, and you know you need a marketing boost when you look up and your team finds themselves dealing with the following related to referrals:

1. Too many B and C Players - One of the biggest problems with referral programs (especially those that pay employees to refer) is that employees with questionable networks are often the most active.  That means you have Duds -  Lots of Duds - being referred.

2. You have way too much referral flow from a certain college/university or company.  It's like the Cornell Mafia example described here (click on the link).  An over-reliance on hiring only people from your school/company of choice means you're dating your cousin.  Again, nothing against developing a referral pipeline, but watch the feedback loop when you have a referred candidate from your favorite college/company going up against an outsider.  Are they picking the known entity for firm, or soft reasons?  Can you hear the banjos playing in the background?

3.  Your top performers don't refer anyone - The most important people to your referral program are your top performers.  They're the ones who know other stars in their areas of expertise.  Too often, it's crickets from the high performing group when you make the call for referrals.  But the group who's on a performance improvement plan?  Active as hell in giving you referrals.  Hmmmm.

All of these realities are why the gang over at Fistful of Talent (my other site) is ramping up our March webinar entitled The SuperFriends: 7 Strategies to Get Your Superhero Employees to refer Their Arch Nemesis! (Wednesday, March 27th, 1pm EST).  Click the link to register! 

Here's what you get if you join Tim Sackett and KD for the webinar (sponsored by the cool folks at Zao):

• Seven surefire ways to engage your best employees and increase referrals (while ensuring your employees don’t refer SuperDuds!)
• How to develop an internal communication strategy for your employee referral program.
• The keys to sustaining your program long-term.
• How and why trends like gamification can lead to better employee referral results.
• The top three reasons 99% of employee referral programs fail and how you can make sure your employee referral program is delivering the goods all year long.

The title really says it all.  While referrals from the masses worked out well for America ("give me your tired.. how 'bout some huddled masses..), you want referrals from the superheros at your company.  

Your Superheros are the ones with the networks that matter.  We'll dig into how to get them to refer other superheros to you on Wednesday, March 27th, at 1pm EST with our webinar The SuperFriends: 7 Strategies to Get Your Superhero Employees to refer Their Arch Nemesis! Click the link or hit the form below to register (email subscribers - click through to see form or just hit the link)! 

See you there.