How to Cut Your Recruitment Costs

As true Yorkshire man, looking after the pennies is one of my all-time favourite hobbies. This is probably why I am focused on helping companies use low-cost recruitment options too.

Recruitment fees have been a strain on many businesses financial pockets for years.  Recruitment Agencies can sometimes charge more than the average salary.  Well, times have moved on; recruitment companies and old-school networks are no longer our only recruitment option!

5 quick tips for saving money on your recruitment costs:

1. Reduce Staff Turnover

Sorry for preaching the obvious, but I think it’s really important to look at retention before heading into the attraction.  We have worked with many companies who have become a training ground for their competition or simply can’t get staff to stick with them.  Sound familiar?  Your issues are individual but many of the solutions are very common.  Some of these can include:  Joined up management approach, clear job descriptions, structured exit interviews, delivering clear expectations to all new starters and offering a competitive salary.  Have a look at your current state of affairs and see if there is anything you can change? Watch out for a future blog post about this on our website too.

2. Get Organised

If you can confidently say that you have a clear and well-communicated recruitment process then well done & feel free to skip this section!

For those who feel that their internal processes could be improved upon, then it’s time to do something about it.  If you are going to benefit from implementing even one of the advertising tips, you need to make sure that the candidate journey and your internal processes are as slick as possible.  Communicate with your brand ambassadors, your hiring managers, the marketing department and your stakeholders. Increase the knowledge about your recruitment processes within the business and collaborate to form best practices.  Think about areas of the recruitment process which could be standardised or automated.

3. Online Recruitment Advertising (Free)

There are thousands of places online you can now engage your recruitment brand.   Some of these include; Social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ Twitter and even Pinterest.  There are also social referral sites such as Branchout for Facebook and Bullhorn Reach for LinkedIn.

Do you have a career page(s) on your company website?   Other methods to think about include:   PR Sites, targeted emails campaigns, community platforms and including links on all your internal and external communication channels too.  Finally, by involving your current employees and encouraging them to endorse working for your organisation, will also help build trust with your target audience.

4. Cheap Online Recruitment Advertising (Paid)

Recruitment advertising fees vary considerably, depending on the media you choose.  Some of the lower cost options include:

1. Pay Per Click (both on search engines like Google and social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn)
2. Job Board Sites – look for a combination of generic, niche and local job boards.
3. Flat Fee or Fixed Fee Recruitment sites such as The Flat Fee Recruiter can offer you cost-effective recruitment advertising packages.  Enabling you to advertise on a mix of job boards for a very low cost
4. Paid for advertising on Social Media sites such as LinkedIn can generate quality response cost effectively

NB:  Although cost is important, the quality of your response and consideration into where your target audience needs consideration when choosing what media.  For help with writing a job advert then see our previous post successful job adverts

5. Outsourcing

By outsourcing part or all of your recruitment function, you could save thousands of pounds per annum.  Until recently Recruitment Process Outsourcing has been limited to the big players with big pockets.  However, there are now a number of companies who can offer very competitive rates to help you with a resource such as arranging interviews or interviewing, CV screening, social recruiting and assessment tests.  In many cases, these companies charge much less than hiring someone internally to do the job.  For more information on companies who offer this service please give me a call and I can direct you to the right type of Recruitment Process Outsource (RPO) company for you.

Do you have any more tips that have helped you to reduce your recruitment costs?  We look forward to hearing all about them.

If you like this post, you may also like:

• 6 Great Recruitment Books
• How to Recruit The Best Person For The Job
• Say NO to Rogue Recruitment Traders