To hire staff it costs money in terms of external spend and internal staffing. With estimates from the REC of approximately £25 billion being spent on temporary and permanent recruitment in 2012, and rising to £31 billion by 2015, the question that needs to be asked is: “Is this money being spent wisely?”
When we ask our clients their priorities for 2012, the things most commonly cited are managing their employer brand, better internal control and cutting recruitment costs as key objectives. In reality what does this mean and what options are open for achieving this?
Employment brand management is all about the candidate experience and their lasting impression of your organisation. If you are a perceived as a black hole when trying to sell to the candidate market, they will think you are probably an organisation who treats staff badly. A typical view is that “I only want to work for someone who cares about me”. The way you communicate to candidates and keep them informed all the way through the process including the “on-boarding” period (pre-start) materially affects how they are going to perceive and portray their experience to others they know.
Now the challenge is separating out the wheat from the chaff, with many recruitment departments inundated with poor candidates that still have to be sifted. Often they will go to Agencies to do this leg work for them – and quite often seem to think the problem has now been outsourced and they can sit back and wait.
Well, I say wakey wakey, recruitment starts with the internal processes, control systems and developing a consistent approach. If you want high performing staff, then the process to hire needs to be high performing. Is the recruitment process treated with the same due care and attention as business sales strategy? If you wax lyrical about how fantastic you are to your clients, but make yourself difficult to approach to hire quality staff, then I would suggest you are compromising company values and in the end you will get found out! The way candidates are treated is a key indicator of the company brand values. Employers need to build trust through consistency & professionalism. You are recognised by what you do.
When the subject of cutting the costs of recruitment rears its ugly head, the temptation is to focus on hard costs and not how you could invest to develop life changing ongoing costs i.e. many plans are tactical and not strategic change. I liken this to the days when foot soldiers were battling away in the trenches and someone comes along with a Chieftain Tank as the brilliant solution to all your problems and everyone says “I haven’t got time or the budget for that right now!” To grow your competence, you need to take time out and then learn how the accelerator can be pushed at no extra charge.
Quality candidate applicant tracking and eRecruitment solutions may be perceived to be expensive to start a project; however the long term cost benefits are immense with forecasts of expense recovery within the first 12 months.
Paul Finch is the MD of Konetic, an eRecruitment specialist. Paul has a strong background in recruitment and technology. If you would like a no obligations chat about how to capitalise and build new strategies to take advantage of these technologies please make contact paul.finch@konetic.com
Paul Finch, Feb 2012
