How We Redesigned the SDG External Referral Experience. And What Broke Along the Way

Imagine referring a friend for a job and then hearing nothing. You don’t know if the resume was seen. You don’t know if they made it to an interview. You don’t know if the recruiter even received the submission. Just radio silence for weeks… That was the experience we were giving people. And for a long time, nobody had stopped to name it as a problem, because technically, the process was working. This is the story of how I changed that. Not just by building a new program, but by rethinking what “working” actually means when you’re on the receiving end of it. What Was Already Working, And Why That Made It Harder Before I explain what I built, I need to explain what already existed, because the context matters here. Our Internal Referral Program is one of the strongest hiring channels we had. Not one of the nice-to-haves. One of the actual top performers. The number that always anchored the conversation: 19% of all new team members came through internal referrals. Nearly one in five hires sourced from people who already believed in the company enough to stake their personal reputation on a recommendation. \n So the idea of extending the same logic externally felt obvious in retrospect. But obvious ideas still need someone to raise their hand. And the moment I decided to raise mine came not from a process audit, but from a brand awareness report. ==As Lead Employer Brand, I’d been tracking our external visibility. When the latest results came in (73% brand awareness) - roughly twice the figure from the year before - something clicked. That number meant we weren’t just present in the market. We were recognized. People outside the company knew who we were, what we did, and what we stood for.== And that’s when I started asking a different question: why let a momentum moment stay in a slide deck? Brand awareness without a conversion mechanism is just a nice metric. The External Referral Program by Social Discovery Group became the vehicle for turning that recognition into something real: a structured, scalable way to let people who knew our brand and trusted our reputation become active participants in our growth. What the Old Process Actually Looked Like \ Here’s what I want to be honest about upfront: nothing was getting lost. That’s important to say, because it would be easy to frame what came before as broken. It wasn’t. It was working. Just working on the wrong things. All incoming referral-related requests arrived in a single shared HR inbox. Candidate questions, inquiries from former colleagues, and actual referral submissions all landed in the same place, unlabeled and unsorted. Every morning, someone had to open that inbox, read through everything, determine what category each message belonged to, route it to the right person, and then respond. 😰 Repeat, daily. The cognitive load of that work is hard to quantify, but easy to recognize if you’ve ever done it. Context-switching at that frequency doesn’t just cost time - it costs attention. And attention spent on routing is attention not spent on recruiting.👎 On the other side, Referrers had no way to know what happened after they hit send. No status update. No timeline. No indication of whether their candidate had been seen, screened, or scheduled. And certainly no clarity on when (or whether) they might receive a $referral $bonus. The experience ended at the moment of submission, and everything that followed was silence. \ **A process that works for the operator but feels like a black box to the user isn’t a finished process. It’s a half-built one. That distinction became the foundation for everything I designed next. The Question That Changed My Thinking When I started working through the design, I kept coming back to one question: how do we simplify this for both sides at the same time? Most process improvements I’d seen were optimized for one audience — either making life easier for the team internally, or improving the external experience.😱 Rarely both simultaneously. I wanted to find a solution that didn’t require one side to absorb the cost of the other’s improvement. The insight came from an unexpected place. I was tracking a package delivery from DHL, and I noticed something I’d never consciously registered before: I hadn’t contacted them once.🏚️ I hadn’t sent an email asking where my package was. I hadn’t called support. I hadn’t refreshed the website in frustration. I just checked the tracking number when I was curious, got the information I needed, and moved on. The system answered my question before I had to ask it. And then I made the connection. Referrers are in exactly the same position as someone waiting for a delivery. They’ve submitted something. They care about the outcome. And under our current process, they had absolutely no way to independently check its status. Every update required either a direct message to a recruiter or just… patience. \ What if we gave every referral a tracking number?🍬 That idea, entirely my own, born from a shipping notification, became one of the most defining features of the program. Not the flashiest feature. Not the most technically complex. But the one that most directly addressed the core problem: people needed a way to know what was happening without having to ask. Designing the Solution: What We Actually Built The solution had three interconnected parts, and the way they connect to each other matters as much as any individual component. The Landing Page We built a dedicated external referral landing page that is completely separate from our main Careers page. That separation was intentional. 🥦 The Careers page is for people applying for themselves 🐈‍⬛The External Referral page is for people advocating for someone else. Mixing those audiences in the same space creates confusion about intent and process. Separating them makes the purpose of each immediately clear. \ The page includes a “Hot Vacancies” section, updated every week, highlighting our most critical open roles. It is a practical tool for directing referral traffic toward where the hiring need was highest. If someone wants to refer a contact but isn’t sure which role fits, the Hot Vacancies section gives them a starting point. 🧑‍💻 It keeps referrals relevant, timely, and focused, which improves the quality of submissions, not just the quantity. \ The Automated Workflow This is where the operational shift happened. Once a referral is submitted through the landing page, here’s what occurs (with no manual steps): The application enters Breezy HR automatically and receives a ★”Referral”★ label. Simultaneously, a notification appears in a dedicated Slack channel, tagging the responsible recruiter directly. The referral is assigned and visible from the moment it arrives. As the candidate progresses through the hiring funnel, automatic email updates are sent to the referrer. Every step is documented within the dedicated Slack thread. The design principle here was simple: eliminate decision points that don’t need to exist. Every step that required a human to read, categorize, and forward something was a potential delay and a potential drop. We removed those steps entirely. The Tracking Number System Every referrer receives a unique tracking number at the point of submission. They can use it to check the status of their referral independently, at any time, without messaging anyone.❌ This single feature eliminated the most common question we’d previously received: “What happened to my referral?” 👾 Not by answering that question faster, but by making it unnecessary to ask in the first place. What Happened When We Launched The results were clear and came quickly. The referral process became twice as fast. In June alone, we received 159 External Referral applications — more than 3.5× the total we’d received in the first 6 months of 2025 combined. Recruiters were no longer sorting and routing- they were recruiting. And referrers were receiving updates without asking for them. 👍The tracking system was being used. Better experience on both sides. More volume. More speed. More trust. But here’s what I’d learned long before this project: a launch is not a finish line. It’s the moment when a designed system meets real users, and real users will always find things you didn’t anticipate. The most valuable feedback isn’t what you collect in planning. It’s what the system reveals once it’s live. We found out quickly.🤌 \ What Broke And Why That Was a Good Sign About a month after launch, one user had submitted approximately 90 referrals.😱 My first reaction wasn’t frustration. It was recognition. That level of engagement meant the program was working: it was accessible, usable, and clearly understood. The person believed in the program enough to use it intensively. That’s the behavior you want to generate. But it exposed two gaps in the design that we hadn’t modeled. ➥ Issue #1: No submission limits existed. The original design assumed referrals would arrive at a human pace: a few per week, maybe. There was no cap because the scenario of mass submission hadn’t been considered. One user referring to six candidates a day isn’t inherently wrong, but it creates downstream challenges: recruiter bandwidth, quality of referrals, and the integrity of the program’s intent. The solution was straightforward: a daily limit of five referrals per referrer was introduced. The more important lesson was about design thinking. Build for the average user, then immediately model what happens when someone uses your system in the most extreme way imaginable. If you can’t answer that question before launch, the live system will answer it for you. ➥ Issue #2: Self-referrals started appearing. Some users began submitting themselves through the External Referral Program. This created a category problem. The program was designed for referrals when one person advocating for another. Social Discovery Group already has a dedicated Careers page for direct applications. Using the referral page to apply for yourself isn’t just outside the program’s design; it’s also ineligible for a referral bonus, since there’s no referrer involved.👐 The process wasn’t enforcing this clearly, which meant users didn’t fully understand the boundary and that was our fault, not theirs. If the design allows a behavior, you can’t blame the user for following it, even though it was mentioned in the Rules. ==⛓️The solution: self-referrals through the External Referral Program are not counted, and the rules and landing page messaging were updated to make the distinction explicit.== Neither of these was a failure. Both were specifications we hadn’t written in advance. And that’s the honest reality of building any live system: the edge cases you didn’t model will find you. The goal isn’t a perfect launch: it’s a system responsive enough to surface problems quickly and a team willing to treat those problems as useful information rather than inconvenient surprises. Every unexpected behavior is a product lesson. You just have to be paying attention when it arrives. What Comes Next The program is live, the numbers are up, and the workflow is running. But the more interesting work is still happening: watching how people actually use the system, catching the edge cases, and improving the parts we didn’t anticipate. That, more than the launch, is what this kind of work looks like from the inside. The brand awareness milestone was the catalyst, but what followed required translating that visibility into something structural and trustworthy. A 73% awareness rate means people know you exist.⚡ A well-designed referral program means they’re willing to put their name behind you. That’s a meaningfully different level of trust, and it has to be earned through the experience you deliver, not just the brand you build. The real measure of a referral program isn’t the launch announcement. It’s whether people use it again after the first time. It’s whether a referrer who submitted a candidate six months ago still believes the process was worth their effort. It’s whether recruiters find the workflow genuinely helpful or quietly route around it. We’re still learning. The next iteration is already taking shape, built on everything the first version revealed. That’s not a caveat — it’s the point. If your team is navigating something similar: referrals, applications, or requests all landing in one place with no clear routing or visibility — I’m happy to talk through how we approached the design. Reach out directly. And if you know someone who’d be a strong fit for Social Discovery Group , the External Referral Program is live and ready, including the tracking system. Your unique referral number will be waiting: https://socialdiscoverygroup.com/vacancies/referral-program == Written by Sviatlana Siamionava, Employer Brand Lead at == == Social Discovery Group == \