Engineering recruiter EPCglobal is offering £5,000 to anyone who successfully refers consultants to the company in an effort to boost staff numbers.

"EPCglobal is quite a small company and not very well known. It's hard to attract the best people and we think this is an innovative way of doing it," Tobias Read, EPCglobal's chief executive told Recruiter.

The £5,000 payment is triggered once a referred candidate has been employed for six months. The company has put aside £100,000 for the referral scheme, with the target of recruiting 20 staff. The scheme will run for three months.

Read said he hoped candidates would refer themselves, and that good recruiters might be referred by friends. He also hoped to attract people from outside the engineering sector, particularly from IT. "We aim to capitalise on people's networks," he explained.

Read admitted that the scheme would "significantly increase" the company's spending on recruitment, but argued that the benefits compensated for this. "If we get high calibre people it will take less money and time to interview them, and they can add value from the beginning," he said. He also hoped it would cut the time he personally spent interviewing candidates, which he reckoned cost the company around £100,000 in lost business.

Read said the initiative would complement rather than replace the company's use of rec-to-rec agencies.