All research

How much does a referral really help?

A lot, at every stage. Across 38 million applications in one recruiting-software vendor’s data, 40% of referred applications reached an interview. Of applications sent in cold, 3% did.

From Ashby, a recruiting software vendor, on its customers’ data from 2021 to 2024. Read the report (opens in a new tab)

Same resume, different door.

Getting in, and payUpdated How we write these

A sliver of applications, a big share of hires

Economists at the New York Fed followed 62,127 applications to jobs posted from 2006 to 2010 at one US financial services company with 2,000 to 5,000 employees. Employee referrals were 6% of the applications and 29% of the hires. Job boards went the other way: 60% of applications, 24% of hires.1

Six in the pile. Twenty-nine at the finish.

Every 100 applications, and every 100 hires, at one US financial services company. Green sheets were referred by an employee.

Every 100 applications

6referred

Every 100 who were hired

29referred
  1. Applied6%
  2. Interviewed21%
  3. Got an offer27%
  4. Hired29%

Every round of review tilted further toward the people someone vouched for.

Referred by an employeeAny other route
Fig. 1 / Brown, Setren & Topa62,127 applications to one US financial services company, 2006–2010.

After accounting for the job and the applicant pool, referred applications were 7.3 percentage points more likely to lead to an interview than job-board applications. Once interviewed, referred candidates were 14 points more likely to get an offer.1

The gap grew as hiring slowed

Ashby, a recruiting software company, tracked offer rates by source from late 2021 to late 2024, a stretch when hiring cooled, especially in tech. Both rates fell. Referred applications went from a 12.1% offer rate to 7.3%, roughly 1 in 8 to 1 in 14. Cold applications went from 0.7% to 0.2%, roughly 1 in 140 to 1 in 500.2

One offer. Count the applications behind it.

Each dot is one application. The highlighted dot got the offer. Late 2024.

Referred

1 in 14

Fourteen applications. Small enough that every one of them gets read.

Applied cold

1 in 500

In late 2021 it was about 1 in 8 referred and 1 in 140 cold. Both got harder. Cold got far harder.

Ashby publishes the offer rates (7.3% referred, 0.2% cold). The “1 in” counts are our arithmetic, rounded; the cold rate is itself rounded, so treat 500 as approximate.

Fig. 2 / Ashby hiring dataVendor data: more than 38 million applications, 2021 to 2024.

By our arithmetic from those rates, a referral's edge grew from about 17 times the cold rate to somewhere around 30 to 50 times. Ashby rounds the late cold rate to 0.2%, so the second figure can't be pinned down more closely. Our take: that matches a slow market from the recruiter's side. There are so many applications per role that a referral is how you get out of the pile.

The edge isn't only about referred people looking stronger on paper. Across nine large firms in call centers, trucking, and high tech, referred applicants were more likely to be hired and to accept offers, even though the two groups had similar skill characteristics.3

What a referral changes on the recruiter's desk

Our take: this section is our founder's experience from years of receiving referrals as a recruiter, not a finding from the studies above.

Why employers lean on them

Referrals tell employers things a resume can't. In field experiments on an online job site, referred workers did better work and were more likely to want to stay on than workers with similar profiles. The effect was strongest when the referrer was a strong performer who knew the person well.4

How much more often referred workers came through

Difference from comparable non-referred workers, in percentage points.

Submitted work on time
+11points
Continued the job
+20points

The person who vouched for them knew something the profile didn't show.

Fig. 3 / Pallais & SandsReferred workers did better work and were more likely to want to stay on.

The larger studies agree on staying power. Referred hires were less likely to quit across the nine firms, and somewhat less likely to leave the company the New York Fed studied, though that result was weaker.31

How to get a referral worth having

Ask people who've seen your work. Former managers, teammates, and clients can say what you did. That's the kind of referral that changes a decision.

Be specific. “I'm looking for a senior PM role at a growth-stage fintech” lets someone spot the opening for you. “Let me know if you hear of anything” doesn't. Make your profile that plain too, since recruiters search the titles and skills in your headline, summary, and experience.

Write the blurb for them. Send the job link, your resume, and a few sentences they can paste in, like: “We worked on the finance-system migration together. She led the data cleanup that shortened our month-end close.” Stick to things they saw firsthand, and make it easy for them to say no.

Limitations

  • Ashby's figures are vendor data from companies that use its software, which the report doesn't describe. They show what happened, not what caused it: people who get referred may differ in other ways.
  • The field experiments ran on an online job site, not in corporate hiring.

Sources

  1. 1Do Informal Referrals Lead to Better Matches? Evidence from a Firm's Employee Referral System. Brown, Setren & Topa. Journal of Labor Economics 34(1); earlier as New York Fed Staff Report 568. 2016. (opens in a new tab)
  2. 2Are referred candidates more likely to get hired?. Ashby Talent Trends Report (vendor data). 38M+ applications across 93,000 jobs. 2025. (opens in a new tab)
  3. 3The Value of Hiring through Employee Referrals. Burks, Cowgill, Hoffman & Housman. Quarterly Journal of Economics 130(2). 2015. (opens in a new tab)
  4. 4Why the Referential Treatment? Evidence from Field Experiments on Referrals. Pallais & Sands. Journal of Political Economy 124(6); earlier as NBER Working Paper 21357. 2016. (opens in a new tab)

Next questions

How we write these

We link every study we cite and say what it can’t tell you. When something is our advice rather than a finding, we say so. The date above is when the page last changed. The longer version

Now see what they’d make of yours.

Get your free report