Many organizations use employee referral programs to incentivize employees to refer potential applicants from their social networks. Employers frequently offer a monetary bonus to employees who refer an applicant, and this is often contingent on whether the person is then hired and retained for a given length of time. In deciding whether to refer someone, referrers face a potential role conflict, as they need to balance their motivations for helping connections find job opportunities with concerns regarding their reputations with their employers. To the extent that monetary incentives shift an employee's considerations away from finding the best matches for the employer, referral bonuses may increase the chances that lower-quality candidates are referred. Using a survey vignette experiment, we find that even a small referral bonus increases the likelihood that referrers will refer lower-quality candidates, and they are more likely to refer people they do not know well. We further discuss theoretical and practical implications regarding the efficiency of incentivized referral programs in producing quality applicant pools for employers.

中文翻译：

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以质量为代价

许多组织使用员工推荐计划来激励员工从其社交网络推荐潜在的申请人。雇主经常向推荐申请人的雇员提供奖金，这通常取决于该人是否在给定的时间内被雇用和保留。推荐人在决定是否推荐某人时会面临潜在的角色冲突，因为他们需要平衡其动机，以帮助人脉关系找到工作机会，并关注与雇主之间的声誉。在一定程度上，金钱激励使雇员的考虑从寻找雇主的最佳选择上移开了，推荐奖金可能会增加推荐低质量候选人的机会。使用调查小插图实验，我们发现，即使是很小的推荐奖金，也会增加推荐人推荐质量较低的候选人的可能性，并且他们更可能推荐他们认识的人。我们将进一步讨论有关激励性推荐计划在为雇主创造优质申请人库方面的效率的理论和实践意义。