Recruitment marketing / Barclays

Employee referral programme

Putting the spotlight on people

We were briefed to rejuvenate the referral programme for the UK Retail Bank, a broad cluster of businesses that includes the retail branch network, Barclays call centres and their Head Office functions. In a departure from ERS convention, we decided to focus on the quality of Barclays’ people rather than the financial rewards, using the programme as an opportunity to raise engagement levels as well as boost attraction.

Familiar faces: an unfamiliar approach

To highlight just how important their people are to their strategy, we decided to make Barclays’ people the centrepiece of the referral campaign. More specifically, we ran a lookalike competition for all 38,000 people in UKRB. The aim was to find four Barclays people with famous features who could star as ‘Very Important People’ in an ongoing campaign to promote internal referrals. Our referral campaign took a three-stage approach. First off, we ran a campaign using real lookalikes to draw attention to the competition and encourage people to nominate themselves or a colleague. Then we reminded people about voting for their favourite lookalike on our bespoke referral microsite: The Green Room. And finally, we treated our four competition winners to celebrity makeovers and dinner at a restaurant of the stars then used their images to encourage future referrals.

Star-studded results

The referral programme had two measures: attraction and engagement. It’s too soon to draw definitive conclusions on the number of people the campaign has attracted as we’re only just entering the third phase, but early signs are encouraging. 601 referral applications have been made since the campaign began; with applications still in the process and 42 offers have been made. Meanwhile in terms of engagement, the competition attracted about fifty entries and more than 1700 visits to the microsite to vote for the best lookalike. And perhaps most importantly, it established the cross-business online infrastructure that will enable referrals for years to come.