Wondering how to reduce the cost of the recruitment process? You’re not alone. In the UK, it costs around £3,000 to hire someone on an average salary when using a recruiter. Opt for an agency to handle things, and you can expect to pay even more. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Once you’ve factored in the onboarding process, the overall cost of replacing a full-time employee with a new hire is considerable.
Many companies turn to in-house HR teams in an effort to reduce recruitment costs. If you’ve already ironed out the kinks in your recruitment processes, this can prove a cost-effective option. However, if your recruitment strategy still needs fine-tuning, it can prove to be a resource-intensive approach.
Thankfully, reducing recruitment costs is relatively straightforward. Tired of spending over the odds on agency fees and commissions? You can significantly reduce your cost per hire by identifying what areas you’re spending the most on, before implementing suitable strategies to yield significant savings.
What are the main costs of the recruitment process?
If you want to know how to reduce recruitment costs, you first need to get a handle on everything that’s involved. The true cost of recruitment includes everything from advertising job opportunities right up until successful candidates join your organisation and get to work. Below are some of the biggest costs you’ll encounter when searching for suitable candidates.
Job advertising
If you’re handling recruitment internally, you may decide to use an online job board to fill vacancies. More recently, companies have been able to use social media advertising to connect with jobseekers, while there’s always print advertising for the traditionalist. If you’re using a combination of any of these, it can prove incredibly expensive. Online job boards tend to be the cheapest option, but there’s little chance that jobseekers will be screened unless you’re using a managed service. This means you stand less chance of finding quality candidates.
Using an agency
Most businesses have used a recruitment agency at some point. While the best agencies can help streamline the process, they’re not the best idea if you’re looking to reduce your recruitment costs. Even those agencies that do the bare minimum will charge a hefty commission, with a percentage attached to the starting salary of every successful hire. In the UK, this is usually in the region of 15-20%.
Candidate assessment
Using an in-house team to handle recruitment? Don’t forget about the additional cost of candidate screening and assessment to ensure quality of hire. Once candidates have been found, you’ll need to budget for all those pre-employment steps. Reference and background checks take time and money, not to mention the assessments that will need to be carried out to determine whether or not someone is actually up to the job.
Don’t forget about those invisible costs
In-house recruitment takes its toll on the schedules of existing employees. Managers will need to screen CVs and be heavily involved in the interviewing process. Once a candidate is selected and the onboarding process begins, other employees will need to set aside time to help them integrate into their new role. All of this puts a strain on productivity levels which can ultimately affect your bottom line.
Main strategies to reduce costs of the recruitment process
Once you’ve established what you’re spending money on, you can start thinking about how to reduce the cost of the recruitment process. Below are a few key strategies you can employ right now.
Embrace advocacy and encourage referrals
Nothing sells your brand better than recommendations from happy employees. When your staff give a shout-out on social media or leave a glowing writeup on professional networks and review sites, people are far more likely to engage with any advertised job postings. If you’re confident that your company culture is in a good place, encourage your employees to use their social channels to share their workplace experiences.
You can also consider establishing an employee referral program. Although you’ll need to incentivise them with modest staff bonuses, referral programs are a low-cost yet highly effective way of streamlining the recruitment process and finding quality hires.
Entice the best talent with quality job postings
A brilliant employer brand reputation and competitive salary are all well and good, but you still need to make an impression with engaging job adverts. If you struggle to create brand-new job postings from scratch, think about polishing up your careers page instead. This is typically the first port of call for proactive jobseekers. These candidates tend to be the most qualified and best long-term prospects, reducing the costly impact of turnover.
When posting job adverts elsewhere, ensure each one is as compelling as possible. As well as optimising adverts for search engines, you need to ensure each posting accurately reflects the requirements of the role in question. Don’t deter potential candidates by listing hard skills that aren’t really required. If you’re open to flexible ways of working, you’ll also want to make a mention of it to appeal to as broad a pool of jobseekers as possible.
Leverage your social media accounts
There’s no point encouraging your staff to promote your brand on social media if you’re not doing the same. At the very least, you should have established accounts on all the key platforms that jobseekers are going to be using (here is a complete social media recruitment guide). For maximum impact, utilise these channels to offer unique insights into how your business actually works. Doing so helps express your values and vision, helping sell your brand as a more authentic one.
Nurture talent pools and existing networks
If you’re advertising sought-after positions with attractive benefits, you’re going to attract a higher calibre of jobseeker. This often leads to having to turn down top-tier candidates. Rather than part ways forever, use these contacts to build talent pools that you can turn to in the future. The next time a position becomes available, you can turn to your shortlist of pre-approved candidates rather than commence a new round of recruitment.
Embrace automation with recruitment software
Without the right tools at your disposal, you stand no chance of refining the recruitment process. The best tool you can invest in is full-featured recruitment software. At the very least, you’ll need an applicant tracking system that will automate those tedious and time-consuming manual tasks like interview scheduling.
If you anticipate a high volume of applications, the need for such tools is even more obvious. With the right software, you’ll be able to utilise more channels to advertise vacancies and screen a bigger pool of candidates more quickly. When it comes to shortlisting candidates, on-demand features like asynchronous video interviewing will also lighten the load.
Keen to curb recruitment costs?
While it’s worth investing in the recruitment process, it’s easy to spend over the odds on hiring the right person for the job. However, you can significantly reduce expenditure by embracing the benefits of recruitment software. With a solution like Teamdash, you have everything you need to streamline the recruitment process while making savings at the same time.
With Teamdash providing everything you need for in-house recruitment, there’s no need to budget for external agencies and third-party support. You’ll also enjoy the benefits of automation. All those time-intensive manual tasks can now be automated, with everything from interview scheduling to GDPR compliance taken care of. What’s more, all of this can be done without the expensive input of IT departments.
Ready to overhaul your recruitment process with a cost-effective software solution? Why not book a demo today and try Teamdash for yourself?
