by Mike Sharkey
Staff Writer
In 2002, the City of Jacksonville instituted a program that allows current City employees to help recruit prospective employees. The Employee Referral Program pays $100 to City employees who refer a “successful” employee, one that satisfactorily completes the hiring process and six-month probationary period.
So far, the program has been a success, but not overwhelmingly. Because the new employees only have to make it through probationary period for the other City employee to receive the $100 bonus, it’s difficult for the City’s Human Resources department to accurately track and assess the program’s success rate.
“I think it is probably somewhat mixed,” said Adrienne Trott, director of human resources of the employee participation in the program since its inception. “At first, there was not a rush and the participation was not as much I expected.”
Trott said the idea to create the program was hers but many other took part in the process of refining the idea and finalizing the parameters of the program. It’s open to friends, schoolmates and former co-workers of City employees but not relatives and no one in human resources is eligible because, as Trott pointed out, it’s HR’s job to recruit, hire and train employees.
According to Trott, the program was not started out of necessity. The City has approximately 7,000 full-time employees, gets applications virtually every day and has a very low attrition rate for its size of an organization.
“At the time we were looking at it, we looked at it in the context of being more proactive in our recruitment efforts,” explained Trott. “We looked at a variety of things like our ads, the language in the ads and the venues in which we advertised. We also looked at how we treated people in our front office when they came in to apply for a job.”
While the City hasn’t kept statistics on how many employees were hired through the program, made it through probation and are still employed, manager of personnel services Rebecca Salter said the program seems to be working and is well-received despite still being relatively unfamiliar to many City employees.
“I have not heard any negative feedback,” said Salter. “We do reviews periodically and tweak things as they emerge.”
One of the things that had to be addressed was exactly what kind of City employee that’s recruited falls into the parameters of the program. The City hires seasonal, temporary and part-time employees all year long. None of them are within the guidelines of the referral program.
“They are only eligible if the new employee goes directly into civil service,” said Salter.
Both Trott and Salter tout the City’s attrition rate which, with 7,000 employees, is remarkably low.
“Our turnover is relatively low compared to industry standards,” said Trott. “We are basically a career service. We tend to hire at entry level positions that have career paths. Our employees tend to stay.”
Salter said the her latest stats show the City had a 10.1 percent attrition rate for the fiscal year 2003-04.
“We currently have only five jobs posted. Usually, there’s somewhere between five and 30. We have a very low attrition rate,” said Salter, adding that certain jobs, whether they get internal help or not, are harder to fill such as high-tech positions, veterinarian and engineers — positions that require specific training or degrees.