How to Create an Employee Referral Form in WordPress

Are you looking for an easy way to attract highly skilled employees to join your team?

Making it easy for current employees to refer candidates for an open job position within your organization is the key to streamlining the hiring process and finding the best person for the job.

In this article, we’ll show you how to create an employee referral form in WordPress using WPForms.

Create Your Employee Referral Form Now

What Is an Employee Referral Program?

An employee referral program is a way to let your employees refer job candidates for a job opening in your company.

Finding the best people to work for you can be tough. That’s why relying on your current employees to recommend job candidates is so helpful.

Here are some of the top reasons you should consider starting an employee referral program:

• Cost-Effective: using your employees to source candidates for a job opening instead of following traditional, more costly job recruitment methods can save you a lot of money.
• Higher Retention: retention rates among referral hires is much higher when compared to other hiring methods.
• Better Matches: your employees know your company better than anyone else. They understand what it’s like to work for you, what is expected of them, and can relay this information to people who will be a good match for your business.
• Attract Passive Candidates: interviewing someone who’s not actively job seeking, but is willing to hear you out, will only agree to work for you if they truly want to. This prevents people desperate for a job from taking any position they can.
• Empower Your Employees: letting your employees help with the hiring process is an empowering process. And if you end up hiring someone’s referral, not only will they be rewarded, they’ll feel good about helping the team out.

As you can see, having an employee referral program has many benefits. And if you’re looking to scale your business and fill some job openings, there really is no better way to go about the hiring process.

Luckily, WPForms aims to make creating an employee referral program on your website a cinch. So, let’s take a look at how to create an employee referral form in WordPress.

Just so you know, we also have a separate guide on how to create a refer-a-friend form if you want to offer an incentive as well.

How to Create an Employee Referral Form in WordPress

Step 1: Create an Employee Referral Form in WordPress

Using WPForms is the easiest way to create an employee referral program form in WordPress.

WPForms comes with the hundreds of templates for every niche and industry, including an employee referral form template.

The first thing you’ll need to do is install and activate the WPForms plugin. For more details, see this step by step guide on how to install a plugin in WordPress.

Now you’ll need to create a new form.

To do this, go to WPForms » Add New, and name your form. Then, scroll down to the section labeled Select a Template and type “referral form” into the search bar.

When the pre-built employee referral form template loads, most of the work is already done for you.

You’ll find the following fields in the form:

• Employee Information (section)
  • Name
  • Email
  • Phone
• Referral Information (section)
  • Name
  • Email
  • Phone
  • Position Applied For (Single Line Text)
  • Why is this candidate qualified for the position? (Paragraph Text)

You can add additional fields to your form by dragging them from the left hand panel to the right hand panel.

Then, click on the field to make any changes. You can also click on a form field and drag it to rearrange the order on your form.

Step 2: Configure Your Employee Referral Form Settings

To start, go to Settings » General.

Here you can configure the following:

• Form Name — Change the name of your form here if you’d like.
• Form Description — Give your form a description.
• Tags — Organize your WordPress forms with form tags.
• Submit Button Text — Customize the copy on the submit button.
• Submit Button Processing Text — Change the text that shows while your form is submitting.

Expand the Advanced section to access more options, such as:

• CSS Classes — Add custom CSS to your form or submit button.
• Enable Prefill by URL — Automatically fill in some form fields based on a custom URL.
• Enable AJAX form submission — Enable AJAX settings with no page reload.
• Disable storing entry information in WordPress — You can disable the storing of entry information and user details, such as IP addresses and user agents, in an effort to comply with GDPR requirements. Check out our step-by-step instructions on how to add a GDPR agreement field to your simple contact form.

Once you’re done with the general settings, you can move on to the Spam Protection and Security settings.

These options include:

• Enable anti-spam protection — Stop contact form spam with the WPForms anti-spam token. The anti-spam setting is automatically enabled on all new forms.
• Enable Akismet anti-spam protection — If you use the Akismet plugin, you can connect it to your form.
• Enable country filter — Block submissions from specific countries.
• Enable keyword filter — Prevent entries that include certain words or phrases.

You can also add your preferred CAPTCHA to your form to prevent bot submissions. Check out our complete spam prevention guide for more details.

Click Save when you’re done.

Step 3: Configure Your Employee Referral Form’s Notifications

Notifications are a great way to send an email whenever an employee referral program form is submitted on your website.

Unless you disable this feature, whenever someone submits a form on your site, you’ll get a notification about it.

If you use Smart Tags, you can also send a notification to your employee when they refer someone for a job position, letting them know you received their referral and will be in contact shortly. This assures people their form has gone through properly.

For help with this step, check out our documentation on how to set up form notifications in WordPress.

You can use WPForms’ conditional logic to notify more than just your employee and yourself when an employee referral form goes through.

For example, you can send an email notification to yourself, your employee, the person in charge of hiring, and even the referral themselves.

For help doing this, check out our step by step tutorial on how to send multiple form notifications in WordPress.

Lastly, if you want to keep branding across your emails consistent, you can check out this guide on adding a custom header to your email template.

This is especially helpful if you’re sending an email notification to the job candidate. You can add your company’s logo to the email header, which makes your form’s notifications look professional.

Step 4: Configure Your Employee Referral Form’s Confirmations

Form confirmations are messages that display to your employees once they submit a referral form on your website. They let your employees know that their referral has been processed and offer you the chance to let them know what the next steps are.

WPForms has three confirmation types:

1. Message. This is the default confirmation type in WPForms. When someone submits an employee referral form, a simple message confirmation will appear letting them know their referral was processed. Look here for some great success messages to help boost customer happiness.
2. Show Page. This confirmation type will take site visitors to a specific web page on your site thanking them for their referral and telling them when you’ll be in touch. For help doing this, check out our tutorial on redirecting customers to a thank you page.
3. Go to URL (Redirect). This option is used when you want to send employees to a different website after they submit a referral.

Let’s see how to set up a simple form confirmation in WPForms so you can customize the message employees will see when they refer someone for an open job position in your company.

To start, click on the Confirmations tab in the Form Editor under Settings.

Next, select the type of confirmation type you’d like to create. For this example, we’ll select Message.

You can customize the confirmation message to your liking and click Save.

Step 5: Add Your Employee Referral Form to Your Website

After you’ve created an employee referral program form, you need to add it to your WordPress website.

WPForms allows you to add your forms to many locations on your website, including your blog posts, pages, and even sidebar widgets.

Let’s take a look at the most common post or page embed option.

To start, create a new post or page in WordPress and then click on the plus (+) button to add a new block. Then select WPForms.

Next, select your employee referral from from the dropdown in the WPForms block.

Then, publish your post or page so your employee referral form will appear on your website.

Next, Make Your Employee Referral Form Private

And there you have it! You now know how to create an employee referral form in WordPress so the next time you have an opening in your organization, you can vet potential candidates and pick from the very best.

If you happen to have a public website and want to add an employee referral program form to your site, but prevent unwanted form submissions, take a look at WPForms’ Form Locker addon.

With it you can easily password protect your WordPress form so that only internal employees with the password can fill out and submit an employee referral from.

So, what are you waiting for? Get started with the most powerful WordPress forms plugin today.

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