“We’d love to use a recruiter, but there’s no budget for it.”
We hear it every week. It’s one of the most common reasons good businesses keep hiring the hard way: running ads themselves, sorting through CVs at 9pm, and crossing their fingers that someone decent turns up.
The thing is, a lot of those same businesses do have money set aside for hiring. They just don’t call it that.
The budget hiding in plain sight. Plenty of businesses run a staff referral scheme – bring in a mate who gets hired and sticks around, and you get a bonus. In tech it’s often generous, sometimes several thousand dollars per hire. In trades and construction it’s usually smaller, but it’s still real money, paid to fill a role.
Look at what that actually is:
- A set amount of money
- Paid only when someone is hired
- To whoever brings the right person in
That’s a recruitment fee. You’ve already agreed to pay someone to find you a candidate. You just limited the job to the people already on your payroll.
So “we don’t have a budget for recruiters” isn’t quite true. You have a budget. It’s just being spent on a much smaller pool of candidates.
Why the referral pool runs dry
Referral schemes are great, and we’re all for them. People who come recommended often fit in well and stay longer. But they have limits:
- Your team only knows so many people. Once the obvious names have been asked, the pipeline dries up.
- Nobody’s out there looking for you. Your sparky isn’t spending his weekend hunting for a quantity surveyor. Referrals come in when they come in.
- The hard roles stay empty. The specialist, senior or hard-to-find roles are the ones your team is least likely to have a contact for.
- Empty roles cost you. Every week a site role sits vacant means overtime, delays, stretched supervisors, or work you say no to.
The bonus is sitting there ready to go, and in the meantime nobody is claiming it.
The numbers: a typical recruitment fee is around 12–15% of the first year’s salary. On an $85,000 site manager role, that’s roughly $10,000 to $12,750. For a lot of SMEs, that’s the number that ends the conversation.
Your referral bonus is a fraction of that. But here’s the idea:
What if a recruiter worked for the same amount you’d already pay a staff member?
Same money. Same condition: nothing paid unless the hire happens. Except now someone is actively searching the market for you, screening properly, and bringing you people your team has never met.
Why this works for Recruitful
The recruiters on Recruitful specialise in trades and construction across New Zealand. They already know where the good people are and how to reach them, including the ones who aren’t looking at job boards. That means they can fill a role quickly and without wasted effort, and that’s what lets them work at a referral-level price.
For you, the maths is simple:
- You were already willing to pay it. The money is already approved in principle.
- No hire, no fee. If we don’t find you the right person, you’ve lost nothing.
- Your referral scheme keeps running. If one of your team brings someone in first, great, pay them. We’re working alongside it, not replacing it.
- You get your evenings back. No ads to write, no CV pile, no chasing no-shows.
There’s no downside. The worst outcome is exactly where you are now.
So, what’s your referral bonus?
If your business pays a staff referral bonus, you already have a recruitment budget. Let’s put it to work. Tell us the role and what you’d pay a staff member for a successful referral. We’ll tell you straight whether we can fill it at that price.