For many employers, one of the richest sources of new hires comes from referrals provided by their own workforce. Companies routinely tap employees’ professional networks to uncover qualified candidates for open roles.
Yet women are less likely to seek referrals and be put forward for jobs in male-dominated industries, leaving fewer in the hiring pipeline. New research lays out a counterintuitive fix: Simply ask employees to recommend even more candidates.
Across several studies, detailed in the paper “Setting Higher Referral Targets Increases the Number of Women Recommended: Evidence From the Field and Lab,” doubling the referral target increased the number of women put forward by 17% to 88%.
The findings highlight an easily overlooked lever to bring more women into hiring and promotion pipelines. It could also prove to be a low-cost and easy-to-implement intervention for companies because it only modifies the number in a referral request and requires no expensive changes to infrastructure or existing processes.
The paper was led by University of Maryland professor and former Wharton PhD student Aneesh Rai, and co-authored by Wharton professor Katy Milkman, University of Chicago professor and former Wharton PhD student Erika Kirgios, and Cornell University professor Brian Lucas. It was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
“A lot of employers are not thinking of this as a solution, while struggling to find talent.”— Katy Milkman
The Power of a Simple Ask
Past research — as well as surveys conducted by Rai and team — suggests managers overlook the intervention because they underestimate the power of a simple ask. Milkman said: “A lot of employers are not thinking of this as a solution, while struggling to find talent. Most figure referrals are already being maximized, as there’s usually a cash reward. But people also need goals.”
The researchers tested their idea in six studies: two field experiments in India and four online experiments in the U.S.
In one field experiment in India, nearly 6,000 real job applicants referred candidates to become surveyors for the research and advisory firm IDinsight. The four U.S online studies included two in which participants imagined recommending candidates for CEO jobs at a technology startup, and two in which they referred business leaders to speak with undergraduate students.
In each case, the researchers asked some participants to make more referrals than others, testing whether a larger target would boost the number of women who were recommended. And it did. Lifting the target from two recommendations to four boosted the number of women put forward to be surveyors by 17% in the India field experiment. (These results even replicated in a second field test with another 1,300 job applicants.)
And in the CEO experiment, the increase reached 62%.
Women remain underrepresented in most business functions, especially in leadership roles. One of the reasons may be hiding in plain sight: the way companies ask employees to recommend new hires.
“You see more diversity by asking for more names as people will be stretching beyond those stereotypes.”— Katy Milkman
Why Women Candidates Are Often Overlooked
The bottleneck seems to be less the supply of qualified women than how staff search their networks to make referrals. In male-dominated sectors, Milkman and co-authors found employees tend to name men first.
Asking for extra candidates surfaces qualified women who would otherwise be overlooked and creates more opportunities for women to get recommended.
“The first names tend to match our stereotype,” said Milkman. “But you see more diversity by asking for more names as people will be stretching beyond those stereotypes.”
Milkman said there was little evidence that asking for more referrals consistently lowered candidate quality. The results were mixed, with some evidence of weaker candidates in certain settings but not others.
The study tracked only who was referred, not who was ultimately hired. Did the broader pool translate into more women getting jobs? Milkman couldn’t say. “There was not enough data. The hiring rate was low,” she said. “We would have needed a sample size 10 or 100 times larger to measure the impact on eventual hires, so we just couldn’t see the signal.”
Still, sometimes, widening the pipeline is as simple as asking people to look a little harder. “Even if you are given a gigantic finder’s fee, this simple step of asking me for four more referrals would make a big difference,” Milkman said.
