Bringing the right people on board is a very crucial task for Recruitment team. And to hire the best quality in limited budgets is a task in itself.

There are two crucial indirect cost elements (possible collateral damages) to cost per hire: (1) Cost of a vacant position – if you took a lot of time to complete the hire, more is the cost of the vacant position (2) if you rushed into the hire; there is possible cost of bad hire. As simple as these sounds, the associated costs (and damages) can be staggering. Business costs from a genuine vacant position can go up as high as possible in a month – if your customer facing team is missing a smart manager. Vacancies in one team can have a cascading impact throughout the company.

So to shave off the pounds and retain the maximum R.O.I possible is to capture the leads of all applications generated from your job listing. Maintaining CV databases and using applicant tracking software will help you in talent sourcing. However, not to forget, that you could rush into a flooded mail box of unmapped responses, and incur costs of bad hires. So here, a mapping platform can enable effective recruiter to candidate interactions.

Having outlined the pain areas and described the ticking HR time bomb in hiring, I suggest not to go for mass circulated print advertising unless you have a quantifiable reason to do so as its costly and brings in time consumption – remember your cost of vacancy is ticking as you sort through a bunch of relevant and irrelevant responses to your recruitment ad in print and cost per hire would go up in terms of communication, travel and re-location as print ad responses are not “mapped” to your job order by any means.

But the major rule comes in now:

Agency Fees: Only assign your hard to fill searches to contingency search firms, a standard rule to follow would be the 80/20 rule. Focus your internal sourcing resources on 80% of your searches, while farming out the most difficult 20% that can best be sourced by search firms.

Whether you are a recruitment agency or working for in-house team, Google Adwords provides a brilliant route to market and can significantly reduce your cost per hire. With this you can Land candidates into the right pages of your website – this should mean an actually job role, certainly not a general home page, providing a good candidate experience. You need to think about the way candidates search and what keywords they may. Think about the ‘types’ of hires you are looking for. You can target candidates who are looking for roles at your competitors.

Leveraging company’s existing branding efforts, recruiting from former employees having a proven track record, internal job promotions, usage of social media like FB and Twitter to post jobs, employee referrals can be the best efforts made by an organization to minimize cost per hire without degrading quality.

Juhi Gandhi is Senior Manager – Recruitments of CapitalVia Global Research Limited. You can follow her on Twitter @juhihr13