14 Ways to Cut Recruiting Costs Without Sacrificing Quality
Welcome to Recruiter Q&A, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers!
Today’s Question: What simple tactics do you use to cut recruiting costs without sacrificing quality?
These answers are provided by Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization composed of the world’s most successful young entrepreneurs. YEC members represent nearly every industry, generate billions of dollars in revenue each year, and have created tens of thousands of jobs.
Ninety percent of our team members have come from social media. By creating content and posting Instagram and Facebook stories, you can start to build a community of engaged talent. If you’re having fun, working hard, and being 100 percent yourself, you will attract the right people. You want people who want to be on your team. You’re always attracting talent if you’re consistently on social media.
— Tarry Summers, The Columbus Home Co.
Chances are, some members of your team may know people who would be great fits for your roles. Add in their friends’ networks, and you’ve got a relatively large pool of folks who, by association, have a higher likelihood of being a fit right out of the gate.
— Jacob Drucker, Supply Clinic
The traditional manual candidate-screening process is inefficient and costly, requiring significant HR manpower. Today, companies can adopt talent-screening technologies that extract skills from both resumes and job descriptions, then produce lists of top candidate matches in real time. This approach automates the initial screening step so HR managers can focus their efforts on qualified talent.
— Sean Hinton, SkyHive
It’s much easier and more cost-effective to retain the employees you already have than it is to bring on a new hire. If a new hire isn’t necessary, then work on improving work/life for your current employees so you don’t need to hire elsewhere. They already know how your business operates, so keeping them on the team is important to cut recruiting costs and maintain quality.
— Jared Atchison, WPForms
Leverage your alumni networks. This could be universities, former employers, or professional organizations. It’s a great way to avoid paying recruiters while ensuring that your pipeline is full of quality candidates.
— Josh Weiss, Reggie
For high-volume positions, invest in some initial screening to weed out candidates who aren’t a great fit. For customer service roles, this might include having applicants answer a few sample customer-service inquiries to gauge their grammar, empathy, and problem-solving skills.
— Eng Tan, Simplr
The easiest way to cut down on recruiting costs is to hire talented people as soon as you meet them, even if you don’t need their help at the moment. The search for talent is what takes most of the time and money. That’s why recruitment has to be happening all the time. You need to have it at the back of your mind as a default, and once you find someone amazing, hire them right away.
— Solomon Thimothy, OneIMS
Training is usually an expensive part of the recruiting process. You can reduce the cost without sacrificing quality by hiring and training teams in batches. Just be sure to allow for Q&A sessions so everyone can get their individual questions answered, too.
— John Turner, SeedProd LLC
One simple way to cut recruiting costs without sacrificing quality is to outsource work to pretrained staff from a business process outsourcing company. Depending on what you need, these companies can quickly assemble teams for you, saving time and money.
— Alfredo Atanacio, Uassist.ME
If your job ads don’t specify what your company is looking for, they’re bound to attract the wrong candidates and waste time. You need to optimize your ads so job seekers know what you want, what skills they need, what type of environment they’re entering, and more. When you set clear expectations, it takes less time to find the right fit.
— Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms
‘Red flag’ questions ensure that only qualified candidates are reviewed and interviewed by your hiring team, which means you spend less time (and money) sifting through applications.
— Chris Christoff, MonsterInsights
Early-stage applicants can take up a lot of time because you’re sorting through everyone who has applied. Make more time for candidates who are more likely to fit your organization and the role — candidates who give clear signals they are ready to sign on. Save the in-person interviews for those whom you think will join your team. Use phone or video interviews for those first rounds.
— Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster
A lot of people are still doing HR the hard way. Try to build a more scalable system so you can do HR without having to repeat all the manual processes that keep coming up. Look to leverage tools that will minimize the amount of labor being spent on HR.
— Nicole Munoz, Nicole Munoz Consulting, Inc.
We have always hired internally without using recruiters. We found this was a great way to hire. We review all applicants internally with a very small committee of 2-3 people. We cut people from the list who don’t follow basic questions on the application process. We do quick, 20-minute phone interviews to prescreen, followed by longer interviews for the final candidates.
— Peter Boyd, PaperStreet Web Design