Referrals requiring candidate application

• Default Off

• Self-service

This new feature revolutionizes the employee referral process by requiring referred candidates to submit a formal application. This differs from previous workflows, where employee referrals could act as direct applications. This change ensures that referred candidates can provide complete application-specific information, and provide consents to expected policies (such as privacy policy)  leading to richer candidate profiles and a more robust hiring process for our customers.

Users

Employees, Candidates, Recruiters

Requirements

Career Site Experience IX enabled

Value

• Existing referral workflows have significant limitations affecting data accuracy, user experience, and integration reliability across ATS systems. Critical issues include: Candidates being unable to provide essential self-identification answers (for example, EEO, diversity, salary expectations) as the employee referral was treated like a complete application. Further, attempts by the candidate to apply later often resulted in the application being blocked due to ATS duplicate application restrictions. Referral attribution often failed if candidates used a different email address than the one submitted by the employee.

• This feature mandates that the candidate must complete their own application after a referral, ensuring they answer necessary questions. The system sends the candidate a one-time use link to apply, ensuring accurate referral attribution even if the candidate uses a different email or profile.
  

  

• With this feature, the candidate provides all required application data, the referral and application are hard-linked (via a referral token), and the workflow is scalable across different ATS requirements (including those that require skipping initial referral writeback).

• Using this feature, customers gain accurate referral tracking and a scalable workflow that supports complex requirements. This leads to improved recruiter visibility by distinguishing leads from applicants, and an enhanced candidate experience through application ownership. Quantifiable improvements include reduced time to hire and better referral to hire ratio.

Initial setup

To configure this feature, read Enable employee referral with candidate application.