Does cost and quality of service hinder your recruitment?
After more than 16 years of working in recruitment, I typically hear the same observations from HR managers, Directors and hiring managers about the issues they have with recruitment and the biggest of these is generally cost and quality of service. Comments such as “recruitment companies cost us too much and we get poor candidates from them” so I thought I would outline a few helpful hints as to how you can save money whilst still maintaining a healthy staff requirement within your business.
Firstly, understanding how recruitment agencies work can give a good insight into what drives some of the behaviours that can be found out there. Most recruiters work on a contingency basis, that is you pay them if you find a candidate. It’s low risk but you pay a huge premium for this.
As a result of this recruiters often have little confidence in you as a client, they also own the candidate IP rather than you so can sell them to other clients – after all, they are only interested in making a fee so will show little loyalty to you if a better role or bigger fee comes up.
1. Do you need to hire?
Often hiring is a reactive process, somebody has left or been performance managed out or in the worst case been dismissed and the immediate response is quickly ‘find me a replacement. Companies should spend time evaluating whether they need to hire someone that is exactly the same and what the role will cover before starting the recruitment process. Often the role may change, somebody else internally may fit (see point 9) or the role can be covered by the existing team.
2. Promote somebody and hire an apprentice (succession planning)
Do you have a succession plan in place? If a key member left, do you have somebody ready or wanting to take on the role? This could mean that you can hire a less experienced or qualified person and motivate your existing staff through promotion or job challenge.
3. Write a good job spec
The recruitment process starts with writing the right job spec, which includes the company brief, person profile, skills, and competencies. This will help make sure you recruit the right person. This is something that I am very passionate about and have written about previously – read about writing a good job description
4. Do it yourself
There are a plethora of options available for companies to recruit themselves for value. The issue for most companies is the time to do this, which is why we exist – to help founders to find the best talent without the expense and time taken out of running their own business.
5. Referrals
In local markets, odds on, somebody in your company will know someone who could do the job you are looking to hire from. How do you approach them, how do you get staff members to recommend people they know? A referral system put in place can be really effective for your future recruitment.
6. Careers Page
It always amazes me how many companies still don’t have a careers page that is up to date or allows candidates to add their CVs to a talent pool. Particularly in areas where there might be a smaller pool of people, building up a talent pool of the local market that you can approach when you have a job is essential to reducing your recruitment fees.
7. Negotiate your fees
Most agencies are willing to negotiate, it’s a competitive marketplace out there.
8. Exclusivity
If you are going to work with an agency, offer exclusivity in return for specific returns such as exclusive ownership of candidates, lower fees, free advertising or research.
9. Contract management
Companies that use lots of contractors can often make savings through better contract management, either through a Recruit Process Outsourcer, standardisation of rates, or volume rate negotiation. This all starts with an audit internally to capture the current start of what you have.
A good process to follow is… Do we need the job?
Is there anybody internally who is planned or would be capable of the job
Do we have anybody in our talent pool that would be interested in the job
Does our workforce know anybody for the job?
Can we do it ourselves?
Go external to an agency? Negotiate, Exclusivity!
The Talent Hackers specialise in providing recruitment services in a fully transparent manner for SME companies. We offer an initial consultation to discuss key challenges you might be facing, how you might overcome these and how we can help you to move forward – email peter@thetalenthackers.com.
