Your employees have hundreds of connections, and there's a high probability of finding great talent among them. Candidate Referrals give that talent a place to land in Teamdash, instead of arriving as a Slack message, a forwarded CV or a note on a piece of paper.
Referrals module gives you a dedicated referral form type, a single list of referred candidate details, a regarding reference on the candidate profile, and its own GDPR settings - so referred people are handled in accordance to your organizations Privacy statement.
This article covers:
Creating and sharing a referral form
Submitting and reviewing referrals
Referrals on the candidate profile, in the Talent Pool and in reporting
GDPR settings for referred candidates
Who can do what
Benefits
One place for every referral. No more chasing information across email threads, and no more referrals that only exist in someone's memory.
You always know who referred whom. Referrer name, contact details and the rest of their answers stay attached to the candidate — which is what you need when a referral bonus has to be paid out.
Referrals become measurable. Referred candidates carry the source Referral, so referrals show up as a channel in your reporting like any other.
Employees can submit without training. A public referral link can be shared on your intranet or a landing page, and colleagues who work in Teamdash can add a referral directly in the product.
Consent is handled deliberately. Referred people did not apply themselves, so Referrals has its own consent request and its own anonymization grace period.
Where to find Referrals
Referrals appears in the Settings menu, directly after References. The page has two tabs:
Referrals — every referral that has been submitted.
Forms — the referral forms your organization uses to collect them.
Both tabs share a + Create button, which lets you create either a new referral or a new referral form.
Creating a referral form
Referral forms use the same Form Builder as the rest of Teamdash, so everything you already know about forms applies here — field types, multi-language support, success text and public links all behave as usual. To read up on the builder itself, see Creating Forms and Introduction to Forms.
To create one: open Settings → Referrals → Forms → + Create → Referral form.
Teamdash gives you a default referral form as a starting point. It is deliberately short, and we recommend adjusting it rather than building from zero.
What a referral form collects
A referral form gathers three kinds of information, and Teamdash groups them into three blocks when the referral is opened:
Candidate — who is being referred: name, email, phone, LinkedIn, CV or other files.
Position — which role the referral is meant for. Use the Position select from feed field type so the form lists your currently published positions and the referrer picks from them. Because the field reads from a feed, you do not have to update the form every time a project opens or closes.
Referrer — who is making the referral: their name, their team or department, how they know the person, and anything else you want to ask.
Any file the referrer uploads is shown next to the referral when you open it, so you can read a CV without downloading anything.
Managing referral forms
The Forms tab gives you the same tools as the regular Forms list:
Open and copy the public URL — for sharing and previewing.
Edit the form.
Clone an existing form as the basis for a new one.
View submissions and download submissions.
Archive and restore forms you no longer use.
Team filter, if your organization uses Teams.
Referral forms are managed separately from your other forms — your existing form permissions do not carry over to them. See Who can do what below.
Sharing the form with your employees
Collecting referrals is mostly a communication problem, not a software problem. The pattern that works well for our customers:
Build a referral landing page in Teamdash that explains the program — which teams are hiring, what the bonus is, and when your talent acquisition team will get back to the referrer.
Embed or link your referral form on that page.
Share the landing page link on your intranet, in onboarding materials, and in internal newsletters — wherever your colleagues actually look.
To build the page, learn more on our landing page tool here. If you would like a hand designing the flow, your Customer Success Manager is happy to walk through examples with you.
Submitting a referral
There are two ways a referral gets into Teamdash.
Through the public form
Your colleague opens the referral link, fills in the form and submits. The referral appears on the Referrals tab immediately, and the candidate is created in your Talent Pool with the source Referral.
Inside Teamdash
Sometimes a colleague simply tells you about someone. Instead of writing it on a sticky note, add it straight away: Settings → Referrals → + Create → Referral, pick the form you want to use, and fill it in on their behalf.
This is also how recruiters and hiring managers who work in Teamdash can submit their own referrals without going through the public link.
Reviewing and acting on referrals
The Referrals tab lists everything that has been submitted, with:
Position — filter referrals by the position they were submitted for.
Search — searches across all text fields in the referral, so you can find someone by name, by referrer, or by anything else that was written in the form.
Click View to open a referral. The form answers are laid out in the three blocks — Candidate, Positions and Referrer — with any uploaded file shown in a collapsible panel on the right.
From the referral view you can use Add to project(s) to move the referred person into one or more recruitment projects and continue with your normal pipeline. Tags set in the form — both candidate tags and project-based tags — are applied at the same time.
Referrals on the candidate profile
Every candidate profile gets a Referrals section.
If the candidate has at least one referral, the section is open by default and can be collapsed.
If they have none, it stays closed and shows "No referrals yet."
Add referral lets you attach a referral to a candidate who is already in your system. Choose a form and the candidate's details are pre-filled — you only fill in the referrer's part.
View opens the same referral view described above. The Add to project(s) button is not repeated here, because you already have that action in the Talent Pool.
Finding and measuring referrals
Talent Pool — a new filter, Has referrals, shows only candidates with at least one referral.
Project view — the candidate preview card shows the source Referral, so you can see at a glance where someone came from.
Reporting — because referred candidates carry the source Referral, they flow into your existing source reporting automatically. Dedicated referral reporting is not part of this first release.
GDPR settings for referred candidates
A referred person has not applied to you and has not given you their data themselves. Referrals therefore has its own section under Organization settings → GDPR → Referrals.
Automatic consent request
When Referrals automation is enabled, Teamdash emails the referred candidate as soon as they have been referred, asking them to confirm that you may process their data. You can edit the message in Referral consent message body, so the wording fits the referral context rather than an application.
This toggle is off by default. We recommend switching it on — it is the cleanest way to give a referred person a say in whether they stay in your database.
Anonymization grace period for referred candidates
This setting protects referred candidates from automatic anonymization for a set number of days, instead of the default 9 days. It gives your team time to look at a referral before the GDPR automation can act on it.
A few things worth knowing:
The grace period only applies when the referral consent automation is switched on and the value you set is higher than 9 days. If referral automation is off, or the value is 9 or lower, the default 9-day grace period applies.
The grace period delays when a candidate enters the anonymization flow - it does not extend how long the candidate has to respond to a consent request. That is controlled by Default data processing consent request validity duration and is the same for all candidates.
The period is counted from when the candidate was created, not from when the referral was submitted. If a referral is added to someone who is already in your system, they do not get a fresh grace period.
For the wider picture, see GDPR settings and automation.
Who can do what
With the standard user roles:
Admin - full access: configures the referral GDPR settings and sees all referrals, subject to the same project access scope that applies elsewhere in Teamdash.
Regular user - sees referrals belonging to their own team, plus referrals that are not tied to a team.
Limited user - no access to the Referrals menu. Limited users can still refer people through the public referral form link.
Note that your existing form permissions do not apply to referral forms — referrals have their own set. The referral GDPR settings are covered by the Can view and update organization settings permission.
Getting started: a suggested order
Decide what you want to ask a referrer, and adjust the default referral form accordingly.
Configure Organization settings → GDPR → Referrals. We recommend an automated flow for consent request and grace period.
Build a referral landing page explaining your rewards program, and link your form to it.
Share the link where your colleagues will see it.
Review incoming referrals under Settings → Referrals and use Add to project(s) to bring the good ones into your pipeline.