Acquiring the right talent for your company can take up a large part of your overall business costs.
For both smaller businesses, who need to watch every penny that goes out and larger businesses who don’t want to be throwing potential profit down the drain, it’s important that those recruitment costs remain contained. So how can you ensure that you’re hiring the right people for the job without overspending on your recruitment budget?
Here are 7 ways to keep your recruitment costs down whilst ensuring you hire the right talent.
Assess your recruitment costs
How much does it cost you to hire a new employee? If you can’t answer that question then you need to assess your recruitment costs, both direct and indirect. Direct recruitment costs include things such as HR administration fees, job board fees, agency and advertising costs, onboarding costs and processing costs. Examples of indirect costs include any loss of business while the position you are hiring for is vacant, additional training costs for the new starter and any reduced output. Also, take into account hidden fees such as paying travel for interviews or the cost of hiring meeting rooms.
Monitor your recruitment metrics
Your recruitment metrics can tell you a lot about where in the recruitment process you may be losing money. Perhaps you need to check in on your time to hire, or your time to accept, or maybe it’s your acceptance rates that are letting you down. Whatever it is, by pinpointing where in your recruitment process is eating up your budget, you can begin saving yourself money by putting measures in place to correct it.
Try recruiting via social media
Recruiting via social media channels such as Twitter and LinkedIn has proved to be a very cost-effective way to hire new talent and with people spending more of there time on their social media than ever, it’s easy to see why. Targeted social media hiring campaigns are so effective because of how specific you can be when selecting the target persona of your campaign, social media platforms know everything about you which makes it easy to put your job ad in front of the right people. Think about who your target employee is and where they spend most of there time to determine where best to advertise.
Encourage employee referrals
Time and time again studies are proving that employee referrals result in some of the most qualified, quickly hired and easily retained candidates. When combined with social media campaigns employee referrals have the ability to slash your recruitment costs whilst still reaching a wide audience of highly trained people. Motivate your employees to share your hiring posts across their own social media and consider offering a cash bonus for any successful hires made as a result of their efforts.
Digitally prescreen candidates
Digital prescreening of potential candidates is often overlooked within the hiring process but can help to ensure that your recruitment team are able to focus on what matters most, which is hiring, rather than sifting through preliminary resumes. Advancements in screening technology have created a landscape where candidates can be screened at the push of a button against factors such as their experience and qualifications, meaning that your recruitment team only see viable applications.
Treat recruitment as a marketing campaign
Your recruitment team can learn a lot from the marketing department as to how to reach a large number of people and nurture them throughout the hiring process using marketing automation. Marketing automation can take a lot of stress off of recruiters hands, enabling them to reach out to multiple candidates at once, maintain contact with unsuccessful applicants and nurture potential candidates to ensure that they remain engaged with the hiring process. The key to creating a successful recruitment pipeline is the same as creating an effective sales pipeline, so sit your marketing and recruitment teams down together so that they can share their skills.
Hire the right person the first time
Focusing on employee retention rather than just reducing your time to hire can help dramatically cut down your recruitment costs, which is why recruitment teams are increasingly being asked to include retention metrics in their business reports and analysis. With the cost of each lost employee coming in at up to 1.5 times their annual salary, having a high staff turnover can cost businesses significantly. Condict exit interviews as a part of your leaving process to determine if there is a common factor as to why people are leaving, and work on an employee benefits package to encourage people to stay.
