Recruitment has been the biggest challenge for many companies that is still not solved. The main reason being that requirements keeps on changing and more importantly it is a TIME vs COST war. It costs more if time is short and vice versa. This analogy opens up multiple alternatives that can improve the hiring process. You can spend some time today to decrease your cost/hire tomorrow. Let me show you how.

Improve Joining Ratio

Joining ratio is a very important metric to measure the success of your hiring efforts. The less the ratio the more you are spending on each hire. increasing the ratio will bring down the cost/hire. But you must first understand why these people are not joining you. Call up all the candidates you have offered but who have not joined and ask what went wrong. Use the results of these surveys to improve the joining ratio. This is an iterative process that has to be done regularly to find out what stops people from joining you.

Promote Employee Referrals

Employee referrals is the most cost efficient way of hiring. Here is how you can boost it.

1. The referral system is very complicated and time consuming to use. Hence simplify the process, make it easy to share the openings on social media. Make sure that the process is dead simple and fast. You may have to spend some time tweaking your CRM/ATS but this will reduce your cost/hire in the longer run.
2. Employees are not aware of the openings in the organization. Have a system where your employees are kept informed about the openings. This can be done by a mailing list or a notice board with QR codes of job descriptions which can be forwarded or shared over social media by taking pics. Many organizations have a portal where jobs are listed, but remember to push the openings to employees and prompt them to take action.
3. Very few organizations concentrate on the spouses of their employees. Make sure that employees referring their spouses get more preference as this will also reduce attrition rates.
4. Make the referral process more transparent. Let the referrers know what is going on in the backend. This will generate trust in the system and help tackle roadblocks.
5. Whenever someone joins you, ask him 3 friends who he would like to work with. If there is an intersection between the lists provided by different people then make sure to follow up on them.

Invest More Time in Internal Hiring

When you have an opening, it is likely that one of your employees is suitable for the job. Invest time in identifying and nurturing talent. This way you can save both time and cost when the need arises.

Again as mentioned above, all these are iterative steps. You need to keep on doing them regularly to see the benefits. If you do that then recruiting will get as easy as it can get.

Gaurav V. Gat is Co-founder at HuntShire Recruitment Solutions. Follow him on Twitter @gauravvgat