How to save money and get better results in recruitment

For businesses, recruitment can be an expensive process.

From advertising job vacancies to finding the right candidates, interviewing them and getting them through the door, a huge invest both in time and money is made into every new hire you make.

But with a little savvy, most businesses can drastically cut the cost of their recruitment process. From flat fee recruitment to spending more time earlier in the process, in this article we run through some of the best ways for businesses to cut their recruitment costs whilst still getting the job done to a high standard.

Do it yourself

Outsourcing your recruitment is one of the most expensive ways to fill job vacancies.

Of course, for smaller HR and recruitment teams, it is rare or impractical to abolish outsourcing all together. However, there are many options for cutting this back and keeping larger parts of the process in house.

Doing this may take some upfront effort and investment, which will ultimately save you money in the long run. For example, setting up a well-designed and functional website that specialises in attracting talent to your business and dealing with applications could save a huge amount on external advertisement.

Flat fee recruitment support

Traditionally businesses work with recruitment agencies to help them fill vacant roles. Although helpful in many ways, this can come as a huge cost.

Typically, agencies will charge around 15% of the successful candidate salary for the services they provide. When you consider the average salary of UK workers is £28k, a business filling around ten job vacancies a year could be paying out £42k to do so.

Flat fee recruitment offers a different and generally much cheaper alternative. For a one off cost, starting at around £200, a flat fee recruiter will provide you with a full service for filling roles. By leveraging their knowledge and excellent relationships with the major job boards, flat fee recruiters will provide CV’s of candidates that have applied for the role and meet your criteria.

Smart management software

Improving efficiency is one excellent way to lower costs when it comes to the recruitment process. By freeing up more of your time in certain area, you can spend more time on the important aspects.

One relatively easy way to do this is to implement a smart piece of management software to help you move candidates through the process. There are many options for this type of software, at eRecruitSmart we provide our award winning software as part of our flat fee.

These types of tools help in large by helping to organise work flow. By making it simple to store and filter CVs, manage candidates through the recruitment process and track interactions between candidates and your team you can save a vast amount of time in admin and save the potential of repeat work.

CV bank

Likelihood is, as a business you tend to employ a lot of people with very similar skill sets and experience.

Too often, once a job vacancy is filled, the unsuccessful candidates CVs are either deleted or stored in a rarely accessed part of a filing system. This can lead to significant amounts of the same ground being covered every time a new vacancy becomes available.

Creating an easy to filter CV bank (see point above) is a good way to save time in finding suitable candidates. Often unsuccessful candidates for one role would be a perfect fit for another and going through the discovery process again can cost a lot and take up precious time resource.

Set a budget

As with anything in business, setting a budget allows you to put plans in place and make sure you get the most possible for your money. When it comes to agency recruitment, it is all too easy to lose track of how much the hire will eventually cost you due to the fact that you do not how much commission you pay until the candidate is accepted.

Setting a budget and using methods such as working with a flat fee recruiter will work to ensuring their isn’t significant creep in the overall cost of news hires. Doing this also works well in helping you to negotiate costs on various elements and helps you to make decisions on solution viability based on cost.

Spend more time

This may seem counterproductive, but spending more time at the beginning of the recruitment process can save you a lot of money in the long run. Saving costs this way occurs primarily due finding the right candidates for the role. In fact, some figures suggest that it can cost you over £30k to replace a member of staff who has not been hired correctly.

By implementing a stronger due diligence process at the beginning, you go a longer way to ensuring that issues will not be faced further down the line. This may involve introducing an additional interview for management positions or running a test integration into the team in order to see whether they work well with those they would be sat with.

Team incentives for long term hires

Following on from the point above, you can go some way to ensuring better candidates for roles if you offer incentives to those that attract them.

Although some businesses offer bonuses or other benefits to those that successfully bring in new hires, this actually facilitates quick, rather than long term employment. On the other hand, incentivising recruiters and staff to refer talent that are likely to stay longer term is a good way to limit recruitment costs.

This can be done by paying bonuses after a candidate has stayed with the business for 12+ months.

All recruitment professionals will know that filling job vacancies can be a costly process. However, by maintaining additional control and using some smart techniques and tools you can drastically cut these costs and save a fortune on finding the right talent. Not only will these save you money, but they will also save you time, meaning you can focus on the more important elements of finding the right employees.