How do you make sure that your company maintains a healthy bottom line? Amidst the turbulent global economy and the competitive labor market, organizations are slowly starting to realize that investing in a good hire will significantly contribute to improving their profit margins.
Human capital is undeniably one of the most valuable assets of any organization. As such, the process of recruitment has dramatically changed over the last few decades. The old school way before was to place job advertisements in newspapers or to place a “Help Wanted” sign outside your office.
Today, the recruitment industry has now grown into a multibillion-dollar industry. The search for top-notch talent at this day and age now requires the use of external recruitment agencies that are solely focused on performing recruitment activities.
Towards an effective recruitment strategy in 2019
With the ongoing “war for talent” in the industry, human resources are no longer considered as “merely” a business requirement this 2019.
The recruitment industry in this day and age is very competitive. Thus, hiring top-notch talent is extremely complicated for an organization to face all by itself. It takes a lot of skills, time, and patience to find the right candidate to fill a vacancy.
Adopting a good recruitment strategy has now become one of the core assets of any organization. This is why making the most out of your recruitment costs is essential to maintain your organization’s competitive advantage.
With the help of the Recruitment Funnel Metrics, Jobvite mentioned several recruitment benchmarks that organizations need to assess to maximize and analyze an organization’s recruitment needs:
Career Website Visitors
These are the number of unique visitors to your career website. It is generally driven by a favorable employer brand.
Application
These are the number of applications received for a specific job opening. Applicants tend to favor a smooth application process on both mobile and desktop devices.
Interviews
These represent the number of interviews conducted for each vacancy. Interviews are primarily driven by consistent candidate engagement that inspires a streamlined and exceptional application process, which will eventually improve the organization’s candidate experience.
Offers
These refer to the number of job offers extended to the candidate for a particular vacancy. Applicants appreciate an organization that has a fast turnaround time when it comes to extending job offers.
Hires
These are the number of candidates who have accepted the job offers. They were driven to accept the offer due to the seamless onboarding process that your organization provided to its applicants.
According to Jobvite, the recruitment process is like a funnel. From the number of website visitors who will explore your careers page, only a portion of them applies. As such, an even smaller subgroup will proceed to be interviewed, and only one individual will be offered the position.
Your organization’s recruitment strategy will be more cost-efficient if each stage of the recruiting funnel metrics will be analyzed. The analysis will give valuable insights and identify areas that will make the recruitment process more efficient.
Here are several tips from Recruiter.com to maximize your recruitment costs and improve your bottom line:
- Assess your recruitment costs.
Before making any improvements, you need to find out how your recruitment strategy is affecting your organization. It is important to remember the right balance between the value that good recruitment brings to the organization and the expenses that come with it. Figure out what needs to be trimmed down or eliminated entirely in both direct and indirect recruitment costs.
Direct costs typically include job board fees, agency fees, advertising budget, onboarding budget, and processing fees. Indirect costs refer to the expenses that are accumulated while the position remains vacant such as training costs and reduced outputs.
- Automate the processes that you can.
Organizations need to automate specific recruitment tasks to reduce the administrative burden of your human resource team. While this may not directly reduce the costs upfront, it does streamline most of the resources of your recruitment team. Some of the things that you can automate are applicant tracking and messaging, website FAQs, and automated help desk messages on social media.
- Build a suitable pre-screening mechanism.
Screening candidates is considered as one of the most underused recruitment tools. Modern recruiting technologies today have made it possible to assess candidates at one push of a button. Recruiters can now share and customize various screening assessments based on the candidate’s needs and its timeline. Building a good pre-screening mechanism to your recruiting process will ensure that candidate assessment is done in the most efficient and cost-effective manner.
- Leverage social media recruitment.
Recruiting on social media is no longer just a fad now. It has become an inexpensive way to promote your employer brand, employee referral program, and other sourcing mechanisms. Your organization can start with one social media channel and build a recruiting network that can eventually expand to other social media channels.
- Reduce time to hire.
When you reduce your organization’s time to hire, you will also reduce your cost per hire. Focusing on this particular area will also improve your company’s candidate experience. By simply streamlining your recruitment process, you can significantly reduce the time to hire. For example, you can start by posting a comprehensive job description on your job ad, using new technologies like video interviewing, and consolidating all your assessments and interviews. These will visibly improve your overall recruitment process and eventually reduce the time to hire.
- Apply marketing strategies for your recruitment.
A good recruitment strategy also uses marketing to expand its network and keep in touch with candidates throughout the application process. There are recruitment automation tools that will make it possible to reach out to multiple candidates and stay in touch with those that did not make the cut the first time around. If your organization builds the right recruiting pipeline, you can attract better and more qualified candidates.
- Hire smart the first time around.
To make the most out of your recruitment costs, your organization also needs to look at retention. Nowadays, recruiters are starting to include retention metrics as part of their assessment because it is essential to find the right candidate that will stay longer in the company.
- Zero in on compensation.
Make sure that your compensation package is on par with the industry standards. It will also help if you add flexible compensation ranges to increase a candidate’s acceptance rates. It will also allow recruiters to nail their first choice for the position quickly.
- Pursue innovative solutions.
Optimize and analyze your recruitment costs to determine what kind of recruitment strategy works best for you. From there, you can come up with an innovative and creative alternative to build your organic recruitment pipeline.
- Boost your employee referral program.
Employee referrals are still one of the best ways to quickly source and retain candidates. Consider enhancing your organization’s employee referral program by tying it in with your other recruiting initiatives such as social media recruitment. This will not only help you build a good recruitment network in the industry, but it will also boost your employer brand by having employees vouch for you online.
Let us help you maximize your recruitment costs.
Recruitment in today’s digital age has drastically changed from the way it was several decades ago. Sysgen RPO is here to offer the best value for money recruitment solutions that will take your recruitment efforts to the next level. We can help your company leverage the latest global recruitment technologies to help you find top-notch applicants your vacancies.
References:
11 Ways to Contain Recruitment Costs. (2019). Recruiter. Retrieved 22 May 2019, from https://www.recruiter.com/i/11-ways-to-contain-recruitment-costs/
Shetelboim, R. (2015). 7 Benchmark Metrics to Help You Master Your Recruiting Funnel. Jobvite. Retrieved 22 May 2019, from https://www.jobvite.com/recruiting-process/7-benchmark-metrics-to-help-you-master-your-recruiting-funnel/
Sinha, V., & Thafy, P. (2013). A Review on Changing Trend of Recruitment Practice to Enhance the Quality of Hiring in Global Organizations. Management: Journal of Contemporary Management Issues, 18(2), 141–156. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.upd.edu.ph/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=93312106&site=ehost-live
The True Cost of Hiring an Employee in 2019. (2018). Hundred5. Retrieved 22 May 2019, from https://hundred5.com/blog/cost-of-hiring-an-employee
