Retailer in Romania pays clients to become recruitment agents

Belgian-Dutch retailer Mega Image has resorted to a different method to recruit personnel. The retailer is offering clients money if they recommend potential recruits. “Recommend us someone who will stay with our team for five days in a row and you receive a RON 50 (almost EUR 11) voucher you can use in our stores for purchases of minimum RON 100 (almost EUR 22). If the person you recommend stays with our team for three months, you receive three vouchers of RON 50 each,” according to the flyers distributed at the cash registers in the retailer’s Bucharest network, quoted by Economica.net. The five days are counted after all employment formalities end. Clients can make recommendations only for the positions open in stores. They can ask the store manager for a list of available jobs and the benefits package. Some of the positions available include workers, sales persons, cashiers, and department managers. Besides the salary, the retailer is offering “meal vouchers, performance bonuses, discount cards for shopping and development opportunities.” A department manager is required to have graduate studies, a cashier needs to have a baccalaureate diploma, while a sales person has to hold a qualification in the field, according to job postings on the company’s website. Experience in the retail industry is preferred for all the advertised jobs. The salaries offered vary between RON 900 (EUR 197) and RON 1,500 (EUR 328) for a cashier or a commercial worker, according to media reports from this summer, quoted by Economica.net. A shift manager was offered RON 1,800 (EUR 394) net. Mega Image is owned by Ahold Delhaize. It is the largest convenience store network in the country. It expanded heavily in Bucharest in recent years, and this year also opened stores in Cluj-Napoca, in Western Romania. The company has over 534 supermarkets and proximity stores in Bucharest, Constanta, Brasov, Ploiesti, Targoviste and several other smaller cities. The company had sales of over EUR 963 million and over 8,600 employees in 2016. editor@romania-insider.com