How to reduce recruitment costs – 5 proven strategies

Posted by

Tegan Kavanagh

Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, many businesses have made significant adjustments to their usual operations, one of those changes has been to reduce costs in a number of areas including recruitment.

A number of companies have cut recruitment costs drastically, while some others would have ceased recruiting altogether.

Many Expr3ss! clients dusted off and put into action the recruitment strategies they used to survive the GFC so that they were in great shape for 2021.

In light of times with such restricted budgets for recruitment, it is sensible for companies to turn to the more cost-effective techniques to action recruiting drives.

This article presents some of the most successful methods to recruit on a limited budget.

1. Recruitment Software

Recruitment software is a must-have to shorten the hiring process, and there is a direct correlation between lowering time to hire and lowering expenses. Hiring staff doesn’t have to eat into your profits!

With so many HR professionals working from home during the emergency, the use of recruitment technology facilitates the collaboration of dispersed recruitment teams. Technology once seen as a nice-to-have investment is now essential.

Every CEO and executive should now be thinking about how to fast track getting more analytical and predictive power inside his or her business processes.

If you are paying recruitment teams to spend time on hiring, you are saving costs if they are able to complete the campaign quicker with technology that aids faster decision making for them.

Management advisory company CEB reported that the average vacancy cost equates to upwards of $500 a day per open position. For Expr3ss! clients that use its predictive hiring technology the average time to hire is 7 – 14 days… with proven staff turnover reductions of more than 60%.

Time consuming stages of the hiring process can be significantly reduced with recruitment software, repetitive tasks can be automated with features such as one-click job board posting, social media advertising, video screening, onboarding, visa and police background checks, online referencing and self-serve applicant scheduling of interviews.

Beyond alleviating the repetitive recruitment tasks when integrated with predictive hiring technology it speeds the hiring decision-making too by quickly shortlisting and ranking the skill-qualified applicants and those with a “best-fit” temperament and soft skills profile Expr3ss! does.

2. Try Before You Buy with Video Interview

Take advantage of technology and include the option for applicants to provide you with a unique insight into their personality and skill-set via video interview.

Again, the time-saving benefits these insights can provide an employer for customer-facing, sales and marketing roles and those “must have” requirements for certain roles can be significant.

Ask applicants to make a brief video to be reviewed at your leisure. Get those important pre-interview questions answered early to help you with your final hiring decisions.

An ideal candidate is more than someone with the skills to do the job. The best fit employee must also be in sync with a company’s unique corporate culture and to the role to which they are applying. After all, passions, habits and temperaments are more likely to unite people than simply belonging to specific demographic.

With approximately 55% of communication stemming from non-verbal body language, telephone interviews may not be providing you with a full picture of your applicants.

Advice site Jobhunt.org found that employers offering a video interview option provided benefit for applicants alike, reducing travel time to the potential employers location as well as the added safety benefit of reducing potential exposure during the COVID-19 pandemic. For an active jobseeker these benefits can be exponential.

Look for no-cost video that is seamlessly integrated with the recruitment software, as in the Expr3ss! predictive hiring technology platform, to reduce your recruitment costs even further.

3. Employee Referral Programs

Having a method to incentivise your employees to refer appropriate people from their networks for job openings is a cost-effective strategy. Employees can be encouraged with offers that are not too expensive such as financial bonuses, gift cards, or even paid vacation time.

These referred candidates are vouched for by someone in the company which adds to their potential drive to succeed in the role into the long-term. What’s more it’s highly likely that the company culture was explained or known to them so that the likelihood of them being attracted to the company is greater.

Ensure your recruitment software easily tracks and connects any employee applicant referral to ensure that the employee can be rewarded should they be appointed. To create reports for management in a timely fashion plus quickly identify the employees to reward for the new hires they referred will help foster the success of such programs.

4. Recruiting Internally

Hiring from existing employees is the cheapest form of recruiting and retention. Companies can setup a program to encourage existing employee’s to progress through the positions of the organisation’s heirarchy.

From the outset, candidates hired that have already been identified to have the preferred temperament, demonstrate eagerness to learn and exhibit adaptability may have the potential to perform a range of roles within a company. Being able to offer opportunities for investing in these new hires and existing employees are more likely to stay in the company longer.

Establishing active mentorships and/or training is key to this endeavour. A LinkedIn workplace report found that 94% of employees would stay at a company longer if their career development was invested in.

5. Making Better Use Of No-cost Job Advertising, Digital Advertising, QR Codes and Company Website

Once upon a time there were paid job classified ads in the newspapers. Remember those?… they got disrupted by the paid internet job boards.

Then the paid job boards themselves got disrupted by the high-traffic, no-cost job aggregators.

Imagine having the ability to attract applicants to your roles from high-traffic job boards without cost. What if you could post your jobs on all these high-traffic job boards simultaneously with one simple action and all from one place too?

Why limit yourself to a few costly paid job boards? Now more than 80% of job applicants across Expr3ss! customers come from these entirely free sources using its recruitment software. Free seems to work just as well as paid – both for quantity and quality.

Now consider, Google’s latest disruptive technology jobs.google.com. It’s rolling out internationally. Google dominates in search and Google Ads dominate the paid advertising market. But what makes this so different?

What’s different is that Google Jobs sits above everyone else… suddenly jobs have become Google’s party, the others might be invited but Google is the host. And Expr3ss! is already on the guest list and our international clients are the beneficiaries.

Google Jobs has expanded from the US and is rolling out across South East Asia. Jobs in those areas are already being indexed and made searchable in the highly-intelligent ways you might expect from “The Big G”.

While you wait for Google Jobs to grow its reach throughout Australia, another three cost-effective strategies to consider are:

to undertake a programmatic campaign
use QR codes everywhere
include your jobs on your company website

Use digital advertising to target those in the field of your job offering. There will be opportunities to promote your jobs using the Google Ads platform, all nicely integrated too.

It helps to know that an average cost of 50 cents to $2 per thousand impressions is a thrifty way to cast a wide net. This relatively low cost of programmatic advertising will reduce your cost per applicant and further increase the reach of your recruitment campaigns. Be sure to talk with your marketing department.

Place QR codes on all your collateral to direct applicants to your hiring technology and make applications for your jobs. There has been a big push towards to use of trend QR codes because of the pandemic plus the changes in technology on mobile devices and phones.

See that the recruitment technology you use has this QR code generating functionality built-in to ensure you marketing department and printers will be able to capitalise upon your recruitment campaigns.

Remember that your own company website is the very place to promote the breadth of roles that your company has to offer to potential new hires too. Your company website provides you with the perfect opportunity to attract talent for your own unique Talent Pool for no cost.

Quality talent that has conducted its own research or “social proofed” your company and now desire to work with you, so much so that when they are on your website they are encouraged to make an application. Be sure that your recruitment technology integrates seamlessly with your website to facilitate capturing your own unique talent pool.