Employee Referrals

Rockie · June 2001

Has anyone had experience in using employee referrals to fill vacant positions within their companies? I work for a medical practice and we are thinking about trying out this program to fill vacancies. Do any of you have pros and cons? Also, what types of "recruitment fees" do you offer employees. I want to make this worth the employees while monetarily, but don't want to over-inflate the price either. Also, do you have waiting periods of say three months to six months before you pay out to referring employee? Thanks for your help!

Margaret Morford · June 2001

I would set it up on a trial basis for six months, sort of offer it as act now and earn extra money. You can always make it permanent later if it's a sucess or bring it back when you have a specific need. You may also limit it to specific positions. Only pay for programmers or nurses, or whatever you are having trouble recruiting. Make the payments in at least two, if not three, segments. $100 when the canidate begins work, $100 when he/she has been at work for three months and $100 when he/she has been there six months. Officers of the company and the people in HR are not eligible. Managers are not eligible for recruiting for their own departmnts, but are eligible if they recommend candidates for other departments.

I have a written policy that I would be glad to send you. E-mail me or call me at 615-371-8200.

Margaret Morford
theHRedge

jbanda · August 2001

Margaret,I would appreciate if you could also send me a copy of the employee referrals policy. My email is: [email]Jbanda@americanleather.com[/email] Thank you

Mikki H · June 2001

We are also a medical practice and have had very little luck with advertising in our area. For our administrative positions (medical staff usually come through national and state publications or advertisments) we instituted an "employee incentive" program for referrals a few years ago. Our employees earn 2 PTO days if a referral is hired and stays for a minimum of 6 months. It has been working well and we have hired many good employees. We actually give people their PTO at the date of hire with the understanding that we will adjust it back off if the employee leaves before the 6 months. We only lost one employee before the 6 month period, out of about 8 over the past years.

Down_the_Middle · June 2001

Our health care facility uses the referral bonus for those hard-to-recruit positions that we designate. We offer $1,000 for fulltime and $500 for parttime new hires. The stipulation to pay the bonus is that: 1) employee must satisfactorily complete the 90 day initial eval period, & 2) we pay 50% of the amount after the first 90 days and the remainder after 6 months. It works pretty well for us and you'd be surprised how many employees split the referral with the new hire........

CuriousG · August 2001

I have used such approached in manufacturing. In fact my current employer has a program that was instituted before I arrived. I hope to beef it up in the future.

I like Margaret's approach of paying the referral bonus in installments. We did that at my last employer to give the referring employee an incentive to mentor the new hire and see that they made a successful integration to the company. It worked. Our "mentoring" was informal, but you would be surprised how many people would take the time to check up on the people the referred and share pointers with them to make the job go better.

I was impressed with the idea of using PTO days instead of cash. It really has to do with what motivates your particular employee population. I think in my last employer's case the time off reward would have been, too popular, as we also had and attendance problem already.

Steve Hall · August 2001

There is an excellent article in the August issue of [i]HR Magazine[/i] (published by SHRM) that discusses employee referral policies and practices. I haven't checked, but the article may be available online, [url]http://www.shrm.org[/url].

~Steve in SD~

SandiF · September 2001

We are an out-patient Radiology Practice and we pay any employee who refers a new employee. I can't imagine paying our techs for referrals but not the rest of our staff. The support staff already believe they are less appreciated than the technical staff. We pay $250 after three weeks and $250 more after six months.

Employee Referrals

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