Talk to any company having difficulty recruiting people with special talents and invariably they’ll come to one conclusion that their employee referral program isn’t “rich” enough and that doubling the referral bonus will ensure that the names of great people will suddenly come be streaming into HR.

Are you kidding me?

The core problem is, of course, how the referral request is made and this is directly related to the position title and its job description. Here’s what most employees hear when approached for referrals…

Do you know any software developers who might want to work here?

Typical response:

“Uh, not off the top of my head but let me think about it.”

Doubling the referral bonus might get them to a different response level:

“Not off the top of my head but let me think about it.”

At a later date I’ll get into the actual tactical elements of my preferred employee referral program but for today, I want to focus on a piece that is missing in all programs I’ve ever heard about (obviously I can’t be everywhere so if this is done somewhere I’d like to know about it): The performance incentive factor.

I think it’s downright silly that companies pay large sums of money ($5K-$10K) for “hard to find” people only tied to 91 days of tenure. Like investing in Facebook stock on the first day of its IPO silly.

Ponder this: For every employee hired through a referral program, develop 180 day performance objectives and if the employee hits these, double the referral payment to the referring employee AND give the referred employee some kind of bonus.

How would this fly in your company?