Employee Referral Hiring in Organizations

Employee referral hiring, an organization’s use of current employees’ social networks (referrers) to fill job openings with new hires (referred workers), is a popular organization practice. This topic has been studied for decades by scholars, and research remains vibrant across several disciplines. While reviews of recruitment methods and their influence on job seekers and organizations exist, they give minimal attention to employee referrals. This gap is critical because an assessment of the employee referral literature exposes numerous theories, deviations in methodological approaches, and other important nuances. The research developed, and emerging across different disciplines, is also disconnected, often overlooking promising findings from each other. Furthermore, the impact of technology and the changing nature of work requires a renewed attention to the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of the referring phenomenon. Our review integrates the multidisciplinary literature to address important knowledge gaps and confront the underlying complexities of the referral hiring phenomenon. We review 101 relevant referral hiring studies from 86 published and unpublished articles across a variety of disciplines, and, in the process, we develop a model of employee referral hiring in organizations. This model portrays the pathways and contextual variables that describe the referring process (e.g., referrer motivations, the hiring process, and referrer and referred worker outcomes). Last, we advance an agenda for future research on this promising topic.