Article: 4 tips to reduce recruitment costs

Sports, Books & Movies

4 tips to reduce recruitment costs

Four tips to help reduce hiring costs are promoting within, engaging key candidates, delegating screening and automation
4 tips to reduce recruitment costs
 

Author: Girish Kohli

 

Recruitment costs are a significant cost for any firm. Here are a few strategies that can help reduce cost of hiring:

  1. Promote from within; hire at junior levels: This technique involves building a suitable in-house pipeline for critical roles. When a position gets vacant, the role is filled in with internal candidates and the replacement hiring is done at junior levels. If pipelines are maintained at multiple levels, a cascade of promotions can lead to hiring at very junior levels. Junior level hiring also reduces risk of hiring failure typically associated with senior level hires’ mismatch with organization culture.
  2. Engage, don’t interview: Interviews are typically not a good selection mechanism. Even with multiple rounds of interviews it is often difficult to judge aptitude and attitude of the interviewees. Partly because the business folks are not experts at interviewing but rather at their jobs, partly because an interview is too short a time frame and is dependent more on what a person tells you and what you manage to elicit. A better method is to engage a community of professionals on aspects related to the business. This can be through workshops, crowdsourcing of key problems, debates, discussions, help forums etc. to engage a talent pool. This same pool can then over time give you the choicest of resources when you need them. By “successfully” engaging them in non-recruitment activity you’ve had the chance to observe them as well as them to experience your employer brand, thus increasing their willingness to move to you for reasons other than monetary hikes.
  3. Build accountability, delegate screening: If a candidate is being referred by a placement agency or an internal employee their job should not start and end at sending a cv matching the bare minimum demographic requirements. Share with them expectations from the candidate and the kind of questioning they can do to judge the level of match of candidate to profile before referring. In its simplest form it can be a small paragraph of why they feel the candidate seems to be a good match. Effort on part of the referrer will reduce the phenomenon of referring for the sake of referring and reduce effort of screening by the talent acquisition team.
  4. Automate: Today many tools exist such as online psychometric tools, online general and specific technical aptitude testing tools, skype and video conferencing, recorded video interview tools. Integrate them into your selection process to reduce logistic costs, and also free up line managers from having to interview during business hours (hidden costs).

Girish Kohli is Associate at Mercer Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @mystiquewanderr

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Topics: Sports, Books & Movies, #TalentMinded

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