Of course finding, interviewing and accepting the people are all important steps, but I guess you can't say it's been successful until you've had time to see how they worked out in your organization.
Let's hope for a follow-up later!
http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/
We bought a Ferrari to give away to any employee who recruited 10 friends. In reality the car only cost $2,000 per month, the person who won it only got to drive it for as long as he or she was employed, and the cost of a Ferrari is much lower than 10 headhunter commissions
To employ 10 software engineers, at say £36k average salary, would have ended up costing close to £70k through traditional recruitment agencies.
From my 15 years in IT, I highly highly doubt it. There is the occasional decent recruiter, but most of them are like realtors, only interested in commission $$$, not entirely unreasonable in itself, but unlikely to be aligned with anyone else's interests.
HR person would say "Thanks for calling! We're having a really hard time finding Black Box developers. Can you get me some Black Box developers?"
The only way to be considered by the company was to answer along the lines of "Black Box? Never heard of that."
Many recruiters utterly failed to proceed any further than this point.
If I've heard about it from that many different sources, so have many other good people with relevant skills in the local area. You have to factor that word-of-mouth effect into any thinking about how successful any additional recruitment drives they've been running have been. If I hadn't gone freelance, I might have applied myself, but it wouldn't have been because of ice creams or iPads, it would have been because the company has a reputation for being a decent employer and hiring good people.
The reason I hadn't applied before was because I was 'reasonably' happy where I was working but this campaign raised Red-Gate's profile in my mind again at a time when I was considering job hunting and also gave me the extra incentive to apply.
It worked, I was hired and I can say that so far it has been a great place to work. Plug for my team, check out http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Source_Control/
There's one reason I reject them immediately as a potential employer: they're a Windows-only shop.
We are just around the corner from Red Gate.
What's missing: they don't say how much they spent on the advertising and freebies.