Referred candidates get hired faster and stay longer, yet few referral programs are easy to use. Phenom Referrals puts referring in the portal employees already open, on any device, and starts the record when a name comes in
Ask a talent team where their best hires come from and they'll say referrals. Then look at the program: a page buried in the intranet, a bonus tracked by hand before payroll can pay it, a referral that loses its sender between the career site and the system of record. Rates stay flat while leadership expects more, and the only lever left is a bigger bonus
Phenom Referrals sits in the employee portal, beside the jobs employees already browse. They can refer a friend to an opening, or submit a name and let Phenom match them to fitting roles. Phenom invites the candidate to apply, and the referral enters your pipeline with the source and referrer's name on the record. Employees track progress from the portal.
Every company takes referrals somehow: a module inside the ATS or HRIS, an inbox plus a spreadsheet, or a tracking link that only counts if the candidate remembers to use it. Each asks for extra effort at exactly the wrong moment, and each loses the record somewhere before bonus time.
Where employees already are. Referring lives in the portal they already use, from any device
Credit set at submission. The referrer's name goes on the record when they submit, and stays there.
The whole journey reported. Who referred whom, which became hires, and whose bonus is due.
Make it easy to refer great people, and simple to see it through.
In healthcare, retail, and manufacturing, the employees with the deepest networks are the ones who never open a laptop. A nurse might hear about a good technician mid-shift. But if referring means finding an intranet page at a workstation, that name is forgotten by end of shift. Phenom Referrals works from the phone in their pocket: open the portal, submit the name, done before their break is over. No posting to hunt for, and no rule that the friend must match an open job.
Refer from a phone The full flow, from opening the portal to submitting a name, works on the device frontline employees actually carry.
Refer without a posting A general referral takes a name and contact details even when no matching job is open.
Share a link anywhere Employees can post openings to their own networks from the portal, and applications that arrive through their link are credited to them.
Most referral programs get one launch email and then go quiet. Six months later, employees are surprised to hear the program still exists. Phenom keeps the ask alive with campaigns aimed at the employees most likely to know the right people. When a hard-to-fill role opens, the team that would work alongside that hire hears first. And because referrers can watch their candidate move forward, they come back and refer again. A program people hear from is a program people use.
Campaigns tied to real openings Send a referral ask to the employee segment closest to the role you need to fill.
Self-serve status for referrers Referrers see where their candidate stands in their own portal, which keeps them engaged for the next ask.
Referral activity where recruiters work Referral activity shows up in the same pipeline your recruiters use, so you can tell what a campaign produced.
The expensive part of a referral program is not the bonus. It is proving who earned it. The referral comes in through one system, the application through another, and the hire is recorded in a third, so someone rebuilds the trail by hand before anyone gets paid. Phenom sets the referral source when the referral is submitted and keeps the referrer on the candidate record through the hire. Bonus eligibility becomes a report you pull, not a project you run.
Source set at the start Credit is captured when the employee submits the referral, not left for the candidate to declare when they apply.
The referrer's name on the profile Recruiters see who referred each candidate on the record itself, with no side lookup in another system.
Eligibility that payroll can act on The record holds from the day the referral is made to the day the candidate is hired, so the who-gets-paid question has one answer.
Referrals land in your Talent CRM pipeline, live inside Talent Marketplace where employees browse roles, and route through your Intelligent Career Site so every apply ties back to the referrer.
When an employee describes what a friend does, X+ Ontologies matches it against open roles and surfaces the ones that fit, so no one needs to know your job architecture.
Referral records carry personal data, protected under Phenom's SOC 2 Type II certification and supporting GDPR and CCPA, with access following the roles and permissions you already set.
1K
employee referrals a week, up from 125
11K
referrals made in under a year
85%
increase in employee referrals YoY
We're getting two things when employees go into [the platform] to refer someone — a more complete employee profile that enables us to let them know about potential career mobility opportunities at Southwest and a referred candidate.
An impressive 8% conversion rate from applicant to hire reflects the enormous efficiency gain the referral program can bring to the entire organization.
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