Referralboard

Gamifying employee referrals

FOUNDER

DESIGNER

ENGINEER

Company Overview

Referralboard is a Slack app that turns your employee referral program into a fun competition. Team members earn points and move up the leaderboard each time they submit a referral.

The idea for Referralboard came when I realized how much quicker & cheaper we could hire by better incentivizing referrals. Since piloting the product at MakeSpace, we've helped teams in 10+ countries, won the Pioneer competition, and increased referrals 8x on average.

Year

2020

Platform

Slack, Webflow

Role

Founder, Designer, Engineer

Funding

Better Hiring,
Starts with People

Every successful business in the world ultimately runs into a similar problem - how can we hire better, faster, and cheaper? The current "best practice" involves dedicated recruiters and services like A-List and Hired. There are benefits to each of these services, but ultimately you can be on the hook for up to $40K for a single successful engineering hire.

Referralboard was built to take advantage of the most underutilized hiring tool you have: your team's network. Although most companies offer "referral bonuses", the research shows this additional compensation is not motivating. Instead, Referralboard creates a simple, fun competition that makes referrals top-of-mind and actually makes a difference. view case study

Design Considerations

In service of our users, Referralboard was built around three core principles:
‍
01 Simple
Everyone is busy - newly introduced apps must be easy to get started and easy to use
‍
02 Integrated
We need to be part of existing workflows so overhead to participate is minimal‍
‍
03 Rewarding
If we are to truly change incentives, it must be fun to submit employee referrals

Logo Progression

As a new SaaS app breaking into the collective consciousness, I wanted Referralboard's logo to immediately tell the story of what we were about.

Here are a few iterations in search of the best way to communicate: simple, fun, competitive.

A logo does not sell, it identifies

Built for Simplicity

Referralboard was built consistent with its own core values: I sought out solutions that were simple, well-integrated and rewarding to use.

Written in NodeJS, I leveraged low-code tools such as Glitch, Webflow, and Airtable wherever possible so that effort could be focused on improving the user experience rather than the code.

Seeing the Difference

Ultimately the success of Referralboard comes down to its ability to generate incremental high-quality hiring leads. In a 6-month pilot with MakeSpace (Series E storage tech company) we generated an 8x increase in submitted referrals per quarter and 2 hired candidates. Since then, Referralboard has been downloaded by companies of all sizes world-wide and received funding from the Pioneer accelerator program.

Avg Referral Increase

Saved per Hire

$5K

User quote

"I feel like I was subconsciously motivated (by Referralboard) to tell people about the company... the process was easy and all of a sudden top of mind."

Referralboard