Are you tired of employees engaging with your referral program? Want to keep participation low, boost frustration, and ensure those bonuses stay unclaimed? Welcome to the ultimate guide for running a referral program designed to fail in style.

By following these “tips,” you can guarantee minimal employee engagement, sluggish hiring, and lots of eye rolls from your recruiting team. Of course, if you’d rather have a successful program, just do the opposite. But where’s the fun in that?

1. Make the Referral Process as Complicated as Possible

Start strong: bury the referral form deep in your company’s intranet, preferably behind multiple logins and cryptic links. Add as many unnecessary fields as possible—ask for the candidate’s last three addresses, their GPA from college (even if they graduated in the ’90s), and maybe their favorite color.

Employees will give up before they even start. After all, who wants to spend an hour filling out forms for someone else’s job application?

2. Keep Your Referral Program a Well-Guarded Secret

Why bother telling employees about the program? Keep it under wraps. Avoid discussing it in meetings, newsletters, or emails. Mention the program during onboarding only as an afterthought—better yet, skip it altogether.

Employees who don’t know about the program won’t bother with it. And no referrals mean no payout headaches for you. It’s a win-win, can’t you see?

3. Promote the Program Inconsistently

When you let the secret slip, ensure it’s random and confusing. For example, talk about the program once during a busy all-hands meeting, then forget about it for months. This will keep employees unsure if the program is even active.

Why would they bother referring someone to a program that seems like an afterthought? Exactly.

4. Never Provide Updates on Referrals

Congratulations! An employee referred someone. Now’s your chance to drop the ball entirely. Never tell them what happened to their referral—no updates on interview status, no notification of a new hire, and certainly no thank-you note. They are probably too busy to be bothered.

This guarantees employees feel unappreciated and unmotivated to refer anyone again. Mission accomplished.

5. Track Rewards Using Manual, Outdated Systems

Excel spreadsheets are your best friend. The more complex, the better. Stick to old methods. After all, that’s what has been in use all these years. Create long, complicated formulas that break whenever someone changes a cell. Forget to mark rewards as paid or accidentally delete entire rows. Hiring teams need to work harder. They get paid.

The confusion will frustrate them, delay payments, and create employee resentment. Trust gone. Perfect!

6. Delay or Mishandle Referral Bonus Payments

This one is a no-brainer: promise employees a generous bonus, then take months to pay it out. Better yet, forget about it entirely or claim the referred candidate doesn’t meet some vague eligibility criteria.

This will demoralize employees faster than you can say “unclaimed bonuses.” Once employees realize they can’t trust the system, they’ll relax.

7. Don’t Celebrate Successful Hires

If a referral hire works out, don’t acknowledge the employee who made it happen. No shout-outs, no thank-yous—just radio silence. Make them wonder if their effort was even noticed.

This ensures other employees see referrals as a thankless task. Make them think twice next time.

Final Thoughts

And there you have it — the ultimate guide to keeping your referral program ineffective, unengaging, and forgettable.

If you’d rather have an effective, engaging referral program, well, just do the exact opposite of everything we’ve suggested here! Instead of complicating the process, prioritize simplicity, transparency, and recognition. Boon makes this easy by automating every step—from submission to payout.

Book a call to learn how we can supercharge your recruitment efforts.

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