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AmTrust Bank, a large financial institution headquartered in Cleveland with retail branches in Florida, Ohio, and Arizona, makes sure all their employees know this motto on their first day: let your job revolve around your life.

It’s this kind of innovative corporate mentality that has won AmTrust a plethora of awards, including the Recruiting Excellence Award at ERE’s Spring 2008 Expo for Most Innovative Employee Referral Program, ERC’s NorthCoast99 Workplace Health and Safety Award spotlighting their wellness program, and recognition three years in a row as a company dedicated to its employees’ well-being by the Center for Companies that Care.

I sat down with AmTrust’s Senior Recruiter, Annette Fernandez, to talk about her team, their main initiatives, and why AmTrust has the highest employee referral rate in the country.

Annette, please tell me a little about your background and how you came to AmTrust.

I came from Nova Star Mortgage. They were unfortunately a part of that mortgage demise, and they slowly closed their doors. When I became unemployed I went out to my networking sources, and it was through that source that brought me here.

Talk about the recruiting team you work with.

We have just a small group: four recruiters and a coordinator that helps us out. We’re really cross-functional, so if I have more needs in one area, they’re there to help out. In my role I spend more time on Mortgage Ops, Finance, Audit, Capital Market or Default Risk, while others might be more Bank Ops, or Account Executives. What’s nice about the way our direction is here is that a lot of administrative work is taken off of our desk. I’m not writing offer letters - I’m really allowed to be just a recruiter here.

Describe your typical work day at AmTrust.

There is definitely no such thing as a typical day. Organization is key. A good portion of my job is sourcing candidates and building a pipeline, even though I may not have a specific requisition open. Follow-up is huge.

The majority of my jobs are classified as corporate. I learn as much about a job as I can, enough to be dangerous, so when I’m speaking to candidates I can really hone in to see if they will be a good match or not. My main role is to narrow down 100 candidates to the top two or three and feel comfortable enough to present them to the hiring manager. I think, do they have the ability to fit into our culture? Because it’s not a typical bank.

What are some of your favorite sourcing tools?

We’re definitely not traditional in the sense where we’re utilizing job boards like Monster and CareerBuilder to actually source. We spend a lot of time all through relationships and employee referrals. Seventy-eight percent of our hires were employee referrals.

LinkedIn is humongous, a huge focus of our company. We have a lot of fun with it, because of the direction we’re under with Ron Bower, Director of Talent Sourcing. He’s very proactive vs. reactive. We’ve actually had hires through LinkedIn, which is really exciting. And we’re extremely involved in networking and going to events like Cleveland SHRM - anything I can get my hands on.

We do a lot of Google strings, sourcing-wise, but we have just found that we get a much better quality hire through employee referrals, and then often times when you have resumes posted on job boards they’re not always current.

On occasion we use CareerBoard to post externally, since we’re a local company and they’re also local. We used to pay to have resume capabilities on Monster and CareerBuilder. Now we don’t do that at all. If we do post, that’s a last-ditch effort. We really believe in jumping in with both feet and finding those people individually, whether it be through LinkedIn or sourcing or employee referrals. It’s a good cost-saver, ultimately.

Please tell us about your employee referral program, how it began, and why you think it’s become so successful.

The Employee Referral Program was in place before Ron Bower started 3 years ago. At the time the program was at 28 percent. By the following year it was at 38 percent. In 2007 we officially changed the name to LINX and were at 48 percent by 2008. We finished the year with 78% of our hires coming from employee referrals.

We have on our intranet web site a section where an employee can go log in their friends’ contact info, and attach a resume, which then goes to a coordinator who immediately screens them. We have a specific deadline to contact every single person, with a live person, within three days. If we need to pipeline them, that’s fine. We’re very hands-on and want to make sure that every person has human contact. Compensation is typically $500, unless its more of a challenging role, say in IT. Then they’ll raise it to a $1000. But we’ve also seen $2500. And we don’t wait - it gets paid out right away.

I think it’s a really true representation of who we are as a bank and our culture. if you are a happy employee, you’re not only productive but you’re are telling your friends and family that they need to work for AmTrust. Secondly, it’s talked about, it’s lived. We value it.

PT. 2 will cover AmTrust’s LifeBalance Wellness Program, Recruiting Gen Y, Onboarding, and Retention Initiaves