Here’s a story of “creative recruiting” worth recounting…a Nursing organization in a small East coast city was extremely frustrated with the lack of qualified nursing personnel they were able to attract.  They tried everything from billboard advertising to radio ads; but their efforts were consistently falling short of their needs.

Finally they devised a plan that worked.  They sent an e-mail to every Nurse who currently or previously worked for them or who had registered with them at any time over the last five years, asking for referral names of qualified RN’s. They offered every person who e-mailed to them the contact information on an interested referral, the chance to participate in a drawing for an all expense paid trip for 2 to an island resort in the Caribbean.

The offer ended up on a couple of the social networks and the organization got over 120 referral responses.  They subsequently hired 6 RN’s from this program… and one of their referring sources got a great paid vacation.

The company calculated that they actually saved money when compared to the costs of using more traditional recruiting methods to find and hire 6 qualified RN’s.  Nice “Creative Recruiting”!