I read a very interesting article recently by Beth Kempton, content strategist at Hireology. The article focused on saving money in the hiring process.
As the nation gears back up in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses are looking to hire qualified people. The hiring process can be expensive, and unfortunately many firms are not sure exactly what their hiring dollars are going to be, which makes it difficult to cut costs.
Kempton contends that a standardized hiring process that allows you to tap into data is one good way to cut hiring costs. She suggests using three key performance indicators to help contain them.
Measure time to hire: “The longer a position goes unfilled, the more productivity is disrupted as employees spend time covering for the open role. In addition to lost productivity, the longer the hiring process, the more frustrated quality candidates will get — which might cause them to consider open roles elsewhere,” Kempton said in the article.
Today, because of the pandemic, millions of people are looking for work and if you don’t move quickly you could miss out on some highly qualified candidates. Make sure you are tracking each stage of the hiring process to find bottlenecks. Kempton used this example: if it is taking “days or weeks for your hiring managers to review applicants, but you’re not measuring this data, you’ll have no way of knowing why you’re losing candidates during the hiring process.”
Hold managers accountable for following a process: If you have a hiring process in place, you need people to follow it. According to Kempton, “Adhering to each step of the hiring process every time you make a hire will ensure you don’t miss out on quality candidates, only hire the best fits for your open roles and maintain compliance. On the other hand, skipping steps in the hiring process means you’ll risk making a bad hiring decision, which will only lead to further hiring costs when you have to re-open the role.”
She suggests tracking percentage of hiring steps completed, percentage of hires who completed all steps and percentage of candidates with skipped steps.
Drive recruitment marketing ROI: Track lead sources, but beyond that, look at which sources lead to the actual hiring of quality people. “Applicant channels that deliver a high quantity of poor applicants will only waste your team’s time and increase your hiring costs,” she explains.
Using these three key measures should help improve your hiring process as well as reduce the cost of hiring.
