Before discussing ways to bring down cost per hire, it’s important to understand what exactly is cost per hire. It is total cost of recruitment divided by number of people hired. Recruiters need to ensure that they include costs like recruitment agency fees & benefits, total salaries, job board spends, candidate travel, relocation and immigration costs to name a few.

Now let’s discuss the ways of minimizing cost per hire. Instead of going the outsourcing way, it’s advisable to take the plunge yourself. You should upfront say no to recruitment agencies and print media and take the online and social media route. Employee referrals are fair enough but still incur a certain cost. Here are some ways by which you can bring down your recruitment cost.

1. Conducting Skype interviews – Using Skype for conducting interviews can effectively lower the cost of travel for candidates.
2. Virtual job fairs – Using tools like Google+ Hangout, you can reduce the travel costs to attend events and job fairs and run your own virtual job fairs instead.
3. Use your website – It’s important to create a dedicated career site of your website and post all your jobs there.
4. Use your employees on LinkedIn – Instead of having a paid Recruiter account, you can always use your employees to spread the word on LinkedIn by either liking your status update or commenting on the same or by simply sharing your job details and getting the word out.
5. Use iimjobs.com – This is, perhaps, the best platform in my opinion which allows recruiters to post jobs for free and also features premium jobs which attracts quality candidates from premiere institutes.
6. Retain your current staff – The most effective way to reduce your cost per hire is to retain and empower your current staff. By investing in employee development and engagement, you improve your own productivity and minimize costs as a result.
7. Use Facebook & Twitter – Having Facebook and Twitter accounts to spread the word about your hiring is a good way to minimize cost of hiring. Creating accounts on these platforms are free and the reach and presence is immense, so access to the masses is seamless and easy.
8. Integrating hiring with marketing – This is an easy way to get the word out. Generally, people who intend to work for you are the ones who use your product. Integrating a tag like “We are hiring” with your existing marketing campaign can give very useful results.

Anushua Bag is the Assistant Manager (Marketing) of iimjobs.com. You can follow her on Twitter @anushua2020