Setup Considerations: Referrals and Endorsements

Administrator Guide

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of referrals and endorsements. It explains:

Why to set it up.

How it fits into the rest of Workday.

Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.

Security requirements and business process configurations.

Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.

Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.

What It Is

Referrals enable workers to submit candidates to open job requisitions. Candidates can also identify a referring worker when they apply to a job posting. The worker they've identified can then optionally endorse the candidate's job application. You can also setup referral payment plans to award workers for referring or endorsing successful candidates.

Business Benefits

Referrals and endorsements enable you to:

Reach qualified candidates who current workers already know and support.

Maintain accurate records for reporting and compensation purposes.

Process a one-time referral bonus payment to a worker who refers a hired candidate.

Report on referred candidates who don't have job applications.

Use Cases

Encourage workers to recommend qualified candidates by offering rewards for successful referrals and endorsements.

Award points to your workers for sharing a job posting on social media.

Rank your workers by their referral activity and process rule-based payments to the top referrers.

Questions to Consider

Question	Considerations
Do you want to differentiate between referral sources?	You can access the Maintain Recruiting Sources task to manage your sources and source types for referrals.
Do you want to award referral bonus payments to employees for endorsing candidates?	You can configure eligibility rules to include, exclude, or differentiate between endorsements and regular referrals. Use recruiting sources that map to these Workday-delivered sources: Self Identified Endorsement Denied
Do you want to enable referrals from social media channels?	You can use the Configure Social Sharing Targets task to enable the social media channels where workers can share job postings. You can enable each social media channel to be available only for specific countries.
Do you want to use referral payments?	Referral payment plans are optional. You can prevent the Referral Payment Plan prompt from displaying on job and evergreen requisitions.
How do you want to track how workers know their referral candidate?	Workday enables you to track the type of relationship between a worker and the candidate they referred. You can: Define any number of referral relationships. Require that a worker specifies a referral relationship.
Do you want to enable referrals to job areas as well as specific requisitions?	When you enable job areas on the Edit Tenant Setup - Recruiting task, workers can refer candidates to a job area, in addition to specific job requisitions.

Recommendations

Feature	Recommendations
Recruiting sources	Map your recruiting sources for employee referrals and self-identified referrals these Workday-delivered sources: Employee Referral for referrals submitted by workers. Self Identified for candidates who identify a worker to endorse them when they apply to a job.
Refer a Candidate business process	Workday recommends that you: Use the default definition and don't add additional steps. Set up a custom notification that triggers on completion to let the candidate know that someone has referred them. Mark the Email field required for all users who create referrals. Marking this field will ensure that the referred candidates receive all email communications.

Requirements

Feature	Requirements
Referral ownership	Enable referral ownership in your tenant.
Endorsements	Create recruiting sources mapped to these Workday-delivered sources: Endorsement Denied Self Identified Configure an Endorsement Denied recruiting source to ensure that Workday removes the referral relationship between the worker and the candidate. This will ensure that payments to workers who declined to endorse the candidate won’t be processed.
Referral payment plans.	Configure: At least 1 amount-based one-time payment plan in the Referral category. A Request One-Time Payment for Referral by Action step on the Hire business process.
Referral business processes	Configure these business process definitions: Endorse Candidate One-Time Payment for Referral Refer a Candidate

Limitations

If you use referral payment plans, you can't split referral payments to a worker across multiple installments.

Tenant Setup

You can configure referral-related parameters on the

Edit Tenant Setup - Recruiting

task. You can specify 1 of these referral ownership levels:

Candidate-level ownership, which enables you to see the worker who owns the prospect or candidate across all of their job applications.

Job application-level ownership, which enables more granular referral rewards. Consider how you want ownership to work when 2 or more workers refer the same candidate to different job requisitions.

You can also specify an optional

Duplicate Referrals Policy

to prevent employee referrals in 1 of these situations:

If the candidate already applied for the job requisition.

If there's a duplicate prospect for the same job requisition or job area.

If the person already exists anywhere in Workday.

If the candidate has a duplicate referral with an active owner.

When you configure

Candidate Level

ownership and your

Duplicates Referral Policy

is set to

Prevent referral if the candidate has a duplicate referral with an active owner

, Workday:

Prevents the referral from being created if a duplicate candidate exists and the candidate has an active candidate owner.

Enables the creation of the referral if a duplicate candidate exists but the candidate owner has expired.

These tenant settings also impact referrals:

Enable Recruiting Job Areas

: Enables workers to submit a referral when no job openings match the candidate's skills.

Enable Recruiting Referral Levels

: Enables you to configure and track the relationship between a worker and the candidates they refer.

Security

Security	Considerations
Candidate Data: Employee Referrals domain in the Recruiting functional area	Enables you to view and modify information for referral ownership, referrals, and endorsements.
Employee Referrals domain in the Recruiting functional area	Enables you to refer candidates and view their referral activity when you add the All Employees security group to this domain.
Set Up: Social Sharing domain in the System functional area	Enables you to configure social sharing tasks and reports.
Social Share domain in the Recruiting functional area	Enables workers to share job postings on social media when you add the All Employees security group to this domain.
Refer a Candidate business process security policy	Configure security for these initiating actions: Refer a Candidate Refer a Candidate from Internal Career Refer a Candidate (Web Service). Enable workers, contingent workers, and pre-hires to refer candidates by selecting one or more of these employee security groups: Employee as Self Contingent Worker as Self Pre-Employee as Self Pre-Contingent Worker as Self
One-Time Payment for Referral business process security policy	Enable one-time payments for referrals by configuring the Request One-Time Payment for Referral by initiating action.

Business Processes

Business Process	Considerations
Endorse Candidate	To ask a nominated worker to endorse a candidate's job application, you can add a Send Endorsement Request Action step on any subprocess of the Job Application business process.
One-Time Payment for Referral	You can enable referral payments by adding a Request One-Time Payment for Referral by Action step on the Hire business process, after the completion step. Workday doesn't automatically cancel future dated One-Time Payments to terminated workers. We recommend adding a notification on the Termination business process to remind the appropriate role to rescind any unprocessed payments to the terminated referring worker. If the referred worker gets terminated before the One-Time Payment is due, Workday removes all future dated One-Time Payments to the referring worker.
Refer a Candidate	Workday only recognizes prospects that you create using the Refer a Candidate business process as referrals once the business process event is complete.

Reporting

Workday provides reports that offer insights into the referral activity of your company. For a list, access the

Workday Standard Reports

report and select the Recruiting
category.

Integrations

You can use the Refer a Candidate
web service to:

Refer a candidate to multiple job requisitions and job areas.

Build an inbound EIB integration to upload referrals in bulk.

Connections and Touchpoints

Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships across your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.

Workday ensures that the referrals policy that you configure on the

Edit Tenant Setup – Recruiting

task persists when you opt in to the Duplicate Management Framework. The framework identifies duplicates based on your configured duplicate referrals policy and match rules. Workday flags any potential duplicates for referrals when you use these tasks:

Create a Referral

Refer a Candidate

Maintain Recruiting Sources

Invite Referrals to Apply

Reference: Edit Tenant Setup - Recruiting