Sirona Says

The ultimate employee referral scheme!

There are some jobs out there that, for various reasons, are notoriously difficult to fill. My local governing body, West Sussex County Council (WSCC), have come up with recruitment scheme to tackle such a job, that I think is simple but I am sure will be very effective.
They are using referral fee / finders fee approach, and aiming it at the end users/customers to come up with the employee referrals. You are probably thinking that this inventive, but not necessarily unique. Until that is, you realise that the job is for Lollipop People (sorry got to be politically correct here!), and the end users/customers are the school children!
WSCC are paying £50 to any child who can successfully find family or friends to do one of the vacant jobs!! 

I wondered if this could be applied to any other problem jobs? Do you know of any?

Top 20 Employee Referral Rewards Schemes

I was recently working with a client on their recruitment process, and one of the areas that they were keen to explore was around employee referral rewards / incentives. They knew what they were currently offering was minimal, and wanted to be able to offer a range of incentives to reward their staff for referring new employees to the company.
So using my network on LinkedIn and other contacts, I reached out to all the HR and recruiter contacts (corporate and agency) to see what other companies were doing around employee referrals and what they were giving as incentives. The question that I posed was, "Does anyone know of any employee referral rewards / schemes, that are a little different?" Thanks to the fantastic response I received, I was able to make some excellent suggestions to my client.

Nearly every email I received asked me to inform them of what all the other answers were, so knowing retaining talent is a favourite subject at the moment, I have compiled a list of the Top 20 employee referral rewards offered by companies below (It had to be 20 because there were many good ideas!):

1. Time off. This was the surprising winner, with companies giving time off for successful referrals, ranging from an afternoon, to a day, to a week (very generous!).

2. Cold hard cash! As always money talks, and this ranged from £200 up to £3000 per referral.

3. Travel Allowance. With petrol prices and travel in general getting more expensive, no surprise this came in at no.3. Answers included petrol paid for and train fares covered.

4. Special Event. An example being a fully paid trip to Monaco Grand Prix

5. Holiday. A week away at a choice of destination, fully paid.

6. Restaurant. A long lunch at a good restaurant to include the person referred to the company