10 Ways To Half Your Recruitment Spend

10 Ways To Halve Your Recruitment Spend

Published on Monday, 10 October 2011 15:28

	By Mark Stephens Follow @MStephens21

 

Mark Stephens has been involved in over 50 cost reduction campaigns during the last 15 years and has consulted with Government on the eGov strategy back in 2000/2001. He is passionate about recruitment and speaks and writes honestly and openly about the changes taking place within the industry and how those changes are impacting both recruiters and clients. 

Would you like to halve your annual recruitment spend ?

In the most recent CIPD national survey of business owners, 96% said that they would like to reduce their recruitment spend in the next 12 months...

 

Here is a list of practical actions that you can take to reducing recruitment spend, without compromising on the quality of candidate hire: 

10 ways to halve your annual recruitment spend:

 1. Audit your recruitment process:

If you want to reduce your recruitment spend, then you first need to understand where you are going to reduce it from. You can do this yourself as an internal audit, or you can bring in outside help.

Some recruitment consultancies, including our own consultancy F10, will offer you a free recruitment audit and report worth up to £2,000. If your company typically hires more than 20 people a year through recruitment agencies, you may meet the criteria required to qualify for this.

We do it, because it provides us with an excellent opportunity to demonstrate added value into your business from day one and differentiates us from other recruiters who only want the ‘bum on seat’ business. If you decide to do it yourself, you will need to ensure that you plan effectively to cover all aspects of the process throughout the recruitment lifecycle, including how you do each of those tasks, who they involve, how long they take, how the participants are selected etc.

When evaluating the recruitment services provided from outside the business, you will need to consider costs per hire, time to market, effectiveness (ideally by looking at conversions to interview and ultimately placement), before you are able to consider where targets can be set for cost reduction.

2. Choose the right supplier for the right job:

It sounds obvious, but 90% of companies use the same service providers for 100% of their recruitment needs. Your options include: Advertise only job board service, full life cycle online recruitment campaigns, high street agencies, contingency recruitment services and executive search consultancies. Within each of those categories, there are specialists for each and every specialism, whether it is Technical, Medical, Sales & Marketing or retail.

Finding the right partner for the right job will save you time and money and will increase the chances of making an excellent hire for your company. Using tools such as Agency Central or just searching on Google for the right supplier, for example: “Defence Recruitment agencies Milton Keynes”, can help find exactly the right supplier very quickly. A few simple questions can quickly identify the wrong suppliers for you. What similar companies do you work with in this sector? What sort of roles have you successfully recruited for? What do you know about?

3. Negotiate with suppliers for a win win  

Most suppliers are open to negotiation if there is something in it for them. Recruitment consultancies operate between 15 – 25% fees, based upon base salary, but much of that is down to the fact that they are operating on a contingency basis, competing with several other agencies for the same piece of business, with no guarantee of seeing a ROI for their efforts.

Offering an agency an exclusive period in return for a fee reduction, is sure to be a win win for both parties. Agencies want good lines of communication and good quality quick feedback on their candidates, this too can help you to negotiate if you can offer attractive SLA’s. Other attractive propositions include; volume recruitment or even an up-front retainer for the agency, in order to prioritise your role.

4. Consider outsourcing your recruitment:

It is a well known fact that the average recruitment campaign costs the company making the hire, anything from £1 - £6k in relevant internal costs to resources, even before recruitment fees are added. Unless you are prepared to allocate the relevant time and resources that your recruitment strategy deserves (after all these new hires are pivotal to the future success of your organisation), then you should consider outsourcing your recruitment activities to people that specialise in it.

This will need some research before entering into this, as there are many models and options and varying costs. In the most recent CIPD survey, over 90% of business owners said that recruiting the right staff for their company was critical to the company’s future growth and success.

 5. Choose what jobs you outsource:

Not every job has to go to a recruitment agency. Some roles can be effectively managed in house. Lower skilled, mainstream positions do not require you to spend 20% of base salary with a specialist recruitment agency. You have many more options, that are available to you, from local publications and journals, both on and off line, job boards that you can go to directly like Monster or Jobsite for less than £200 per campaign or online recruiters such as Web Recruit or our own service Smart Recruit Online, that will post your job onto multiple job boards and filter the response for you for one flat fee. Smart online recruitment prices start at just £295, for up to 1 months advertising across several hundred job boards and will filter the responses for you, so that you only see a selection of the strongest applicants. You can even make multiple hires for your 1 fee.

6. Use the tools that then recruitment companies use:

Online job board advertising was once the secret tool of the recruitment consultant, but these days anyone can advertise their own jobs online. However, with the advent of social media, recruiters are turning to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter as the tools of their trade, especially when it comes to searching for passive candidates. If you are considering bringing recruitment in house, then you will need to have a social media strategy to compliment your efforts. Many of the social media tools are free to use, but investment of time to learn how to use them effectively is essential.

7. Use an online strategy for all your lower salary and mainstream positions

I know that we have mentioned this already, but it is so important in your cost reduction strategy. There are many online job boards that are free to use and the flat fee services, like Smart Recruit Online, are negligible in cost compared to an agency or press advertising campaign and also offer guarantees or your money back. Utilising them to satisfy jobs where there is no critical element relating to the calibre of individual or the rare blend of skills required is both cost and time saving. This strategy alone can save up to 90% on a recruitment hire.

8. Use your own website to advertise your jobs

This is so simple and yet so under-utilised, it is embarrassing. If you don’t have a careers page on your website, get one developed ASAP. It is not expensive and one direct hire will have paid for it several times over. Use your social media strategy to post these jobs and links back to the jobs page on your website. It helps attract extra applicants, but the back links to your website can help with the main site's SEO too.

9. Review your processes every 12 months

The market and the environment is constantly changing and once you have performed an audit, you have the template to operate a review every 12 months. It makes practical sense and sends out a message to the business that you take the recruitment of talent into your organisation very seriously.

10. Use other ways to attract direct hires

Implement a refer a friend scheme and pay your own staff £500 for referring someone that you subsequently hire (paid after the new hire completes their probation period).

Run careers fairs at Universities or at your own facility and send out invitations. Having close relations with a local University of A level college can pay dividends in attracting young talent into the company. There are also government schemes set up to assist and encourage you, including part funding salaries for the first 3 months.

Use internships. Offering University Interns or recently graduated individuals on an internship, is extremely cost effective. We have hired 8 staff through this programme and 5 of them have been taken on permanently at the end of their internship, so the programme worked well for both parties, including those that did not stay, who were able to use their experience within our organisation, in order to secure a permanent position elsewhere.

Relevant Links

The F10 Group

Smart Recruit Online