Passionate about supporting your business to increase the quality and reduce the cost of hiring talent!

10 Practical & Simple Ways to Reduce the Cost of Hiring 

1. Implement an Employee Referral Scheme

Research demonstrates that employees usually refer friends they know will be good hires. Although, this does relies on the current engagement of your staff. If you are thinking of introducing a referral scheme keep it simple, ensure the process is written clearly and you take some time to consider the best reward for your organisation – Cash is King or duvet days! You may also want to consider a way of recognising the successful referrer – via the company newsletter or magazine.

2. Advertise Internally

It’s no good implementing an Employee Referral Scheme if you don’t let your employees know of every single vacancy.  Make sure this is distributed across the different branches and don’t forget the remote staff, home workers and employees on maternity or paternity leave or simply out in the field! Better still implement a system to record details on your existing talent (skills, knowledge, types of experience and language capability) and manage and transfer your key resources as and when they are most required.

3. Company Website

Use the company website to advertise and attract external applicants. Lots of organisations already use their website and have been doing so for many years – it’s not a new idea. However, it’s still surprising the amount of smaller organisations that don’t use their own website or don’t keep it up to date or properly present opportunities – this is a great opportunity to communicate to an engaged audience!

4. Use Social Media

Consider what channel is most appropriate for your organisation and the industry, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. If your company policy allows, your staff can use social media to let their friends know there are open vacancies and direct candidates to your website.  LinkedIn in particular is a fantastic database of candidates and if you know how to use properly you can attract and contact candidates for free.

5. Newspaper Adverts

Local newspaper adverts are much cheaper than you think – go through an advertising agency and you’ll benefit from their purchase power rather than going direct and they write good copy too! You will want to invite several companies to pitch and remember to negotiate! Never accept the first price package offered – there’s always scope to reduce the costs. Some advertising agencies also offer a CV screening service – you’ll want to work out the cost of one of your managers or a member of your team spending time reviewing CVs and calculate the savings accordingly.

6. On-line Job Boards

As above be aware you could be spending more time screening out then screening in – so weigh up the savings with the amount of time spent reading CVs. In my experience as an in-house recruiter I’ve used Personnel Today, The Lawyer on-line and eFinancial Careers and many more with good results. Just advertising on The Lawyer and making two placements saved the organisation £40k.

7. Use your Speculative Applications

These are candidates that want to work for the organisation. They have been pre-sold! The down side with speculative applications is the timing. However, this is still an under utilized and usually poorly managed candidate pool. If your organisation doesn’t have an automated vacancy and candidate management system encourage candidates to take responsibility for their job search and regularly visit the website for new vacancies.

8. Jobcentre Plus

Meet and partner with your local advisor. I have to admit I’ve not been a positive advocate for JCP in the past and it is still hit and miss if you receive a good quality application. I’d also say it’s not suitable for every organisation. So we strongly suggestion don’t just post a job onto the website – this will result in random applications and cause you more work. If you meet with your local advisors they are more likely to screen out candidates before they submit their applications. After all it’s free and you only need one applicant.

9. Partner with Local Businesses

It’s good to work in collaboration in your local community. The Joint Venture approach particularly among small to medium businesses has been steadily growing over the past few years and increasing their competitive edge in the market place. Those who are partnering have realised the value they can offer to their existing clients’ increases dramatically, creates more opportunities and more revenue. Think about sharing the cost of open events or job fairs etc. It’s good to network with your competition!

10. Contact Local Companies

Contact companies that are making redundancies and ask their HR department if you can help redeploy staff. Give them your JDs and adverts to post internally and distribute – I’ve always received a good response when offering to help. Making roles redundant is not one of the most enjoyable tasks in HR – so most professional HR personnel will welcome opportunities to increase the number of options to redeploy staff – this demonstrates professional integrity and an ethnic approach which will protect the reputation of the organisation.

Contact me Dawn at Your Interview Coach to discuss in-house training designed specifically for the needs of your hiring managers and business.