The Workplace Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for members of the workforce navigating the professional setting. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Ever since the pandemic began the employees have been referring far more candidates than usual, but the quality has declined. We are getting far more junk-quality referrals.
I suspect that these are mostly friends and family referrals, not professional ones.
Employees are using the referral portal as a landfill for social favors. How can this be fixed? I am basically the HR #2 at the company.
Create a false responsibility.
I assume that they are referring people for certain jobs and not just dumping their CV in "do you know someone who would be a good fit?".
Ask to add a few fields to the posting. Like "Tell us more about this referral. What is your relationship with this person? Is this person looking for a job? Do you know when they can start?"
And most importantly: Tell us why you think this is a good recommendation and in the brackets you could give an example ("we are looking for someone who uses Ruby on Rails and this person must have 5 years of experience").
This will create a feeling that they should tell the truth (because otherwise they are lying to their employer) and because they must back it up with their own names they will be held responsible for the quality of the referral.
Also create a dump: "do you know someone who would be a good fit but we don't have position for them now" without any restrictions. People will choose the path of least resistance and will use it more often.
I agree with you that fresh graduates from India is probably not a good/handy way to fill open positions in your company, unless your company is also located in India of course.
However I do think you seem quite rigorous and quick to write certain people off. Unemployed people are not necessary unqualified. A grocery store cashier might actually have a relevant diploma but is working there until he finds something in his/her field. If "poor social skills" just mean a bit shy and/or a little bit less gung-ho than your current workforce they could still be a good employee for a lot of functions.
So although I agree with the other answer that your employees should motivate their referrals, I also think you could perhaps be a bit more open-minded.
Consider identifying an absolutely key subset of requirements for each position. Not the "wishlist" common in the advertised requirements, but the really non-negotiable firm requirements.
Then expand your recommendation submission to specifically ask the referrer to indicate for each requirement if it is met, eg:
does this candidate currently have authorization to work in [job location country]? Y/N
does this person have 2 or more years of experience in [area] ? Y/N
(Make sure you are only asking legal questions - eg, work authorization is an allowed criteria because obtaining it for a worker is a very different and not necessarily even possible path, but many other things are specifically disallowed)
You could then have some form automation where if the answer to any of the above is "no" a text-box question asking for a free-form explanation of why the recommender feels the candidate is still qualified and suitable activates, and must be filled in before the form will submit itself.
Of course you also want to have a general space for custom text where the candidate's unique suitability can be explained - the actual "recommendation" vs "referral" part of the process as this will help distinguish the strong recommendations from the more ambivalent submissions.
No doubt some recommendations will still make dubious assessments, so it's probably worth having a feedback mechanism that serves as a reminder of how the recommendation system is supposed to be used.
The already raised idea of giving a non-specific category for social-obligation recommendations isn't a bad one, but probably needs to be vetted by legal for compliance with applicable regulations.
An entirely other tack is to have the recommendation form simply consist of a candidate name field and two upload widgets: the first for an actual letter of recommendation and the second for the resume. Some guiding text explaining the importance and expectations of the letter wouldn't be bad; regardless those who really understand what recommending someone for a position means and who take time to truly write a recommendation are going to be the inputs with weight distinguishing them from the convenience submissions.
If the quality of the referrals is insufficient but still better than the quality of regular applications, start running the same screening on referral CVs you do for regular applications.
If the quality is just marginally better or on par with regular applications, simply stop accepting referrals. The point of referrals is to gain time in the hiring process, not to lose more time. If referrals make your hiring team lose time, then spending even more time trying to improve the quality of referrals is essentially turd polishing.
Or, on a crazy whim, create a real sense of responsibility by offering monetary rewards for good referrals. Tell your employees you will only accept one referral per year, so that they would feel at a loss wasting it on a bad candidate. If the quality doesn't improve, go back to paragraph 2.
