3 Key Players Who Should be Involved with Your Hiring Budget Decisions

Consider the number of people involved in your hiring process. Hiring managers, your HR team, and even company executives all weigh in because finding talent that is skilled and a great fit for your organization is complex. Creating a collaborative process makes talent acquisition more effective.

Now think about how many people are involved in setting your hiring budget. Chances are only a few leaders make those decisions. These individuals are probably removed from the hiring process, yet they alone decide how much money is allotted for hiring.

The lack of communication between hiring budget decision-makers and hiring professionals is astounding. In fact, our report, Making the Most of Your Hiring Budget: The Problems that Are Leading to Waste revealed at least 1 in 3 internal recruiters and hiring managers have no say at all in the hiring budget or how it’s spent. Only 8% said they are ever involved in those decisions.

Balancing the company’s budget is a big responsibility, making it illogical to not have the people most involved with the hiring process weigh in with their unique experiences. Decision-makers must gather the most inclusive information to ensure that money is being used effectively.

Here are three people in your hiring process who need to be part of your hiring budget conversation:

Lower-level HR employees

This might be the most obvious, but not all levels of HR — and their contributions to the hiring process — are considered equally. And that’s bringing many HR professionals down.

A hiring process is only truly effective if the hiring team members are happy. When they are stressed or stretched thin, mistakes are made, leading to costly, bad hires. You need to check in with the rest of your HR team to make sure they don’t need additional resources.

Unfortunately, most HR employees involved in the hiring process wish they had more help. In our report, 21% of those respondents said if they received an increase in the budget, they’d spend the money hiring someone else to help with recruiting and hiring.

The health and happiness of your employees should always come first. If a change in how funds are spent will eliminate stress, you need to know about it. Because any stress on the system is likely to have a ripple effect, conduct regular, anonymous employee surveys to gauge what’s going on with everyone on the hiring team, from hiring managers and recruiters to HR leaders.

Ask about the hours they work and the amount of responsibility they have. If you see signs of stress, hold a team meeting to discuss possible solutions. You might not be able to create a new role, but other adjustments can be made without depleting your hiring budget.

For example, many companies post their job openings on multiple job sites to gain the most exposure for their listing. While this means more job seekers see the posting, it also creates an opportunity for many more unqualified applications to land in HR professionals’ inboxes.

Plus, each additional job board you use costs money. It’s better to identify where your best candidates come from, and then focus your efforts strictly on talent sources you know deliver great hires without overwhelming the HR team.

Hiring managers

Among their responsibilities, HR leaders usually research and choose hiring tools for their teams. They go through countless trials and demos — but they rarely get real-life practice with the tools. It’s hiring managers who are in the trenches, learning what works and what doesn’t. Without their input, companies waste money on tools with little return on investment (ROI).

In fact, our hiring budget report confirmed this troubling trend. For instance, 67% of our respondents use background checks in their hiring process. Yet 13% of those users also say the tool has the lowest ROI. Furthermore, 42% of respondents use personality assessments and a quarter of those users are unsatisfied with their ROI. When it comes to hiring data analytics tools, 27% of respondents continue to use them despite 19% saying it has the lowest ROI.

Ask hiring managers about their satisfaction with the tools they use. Let them know how much those tools cost and see if your managers agree they are worth it. This will quickly weed out tools that need to be replaced or updated so you can adjust the hiring budget accordingly.

When it’s evident you need to replace a hiring tool, work alongside hiring managers to identify exactly why it isn’t a worthwhile investment. User experience is an important factor, but you need to get to the bottom of the tool’s impact on hiring outcomes.

Does using the hiring tool add too much time to the process? Do hiring managers disagree with the tool’s assessment of candidates? Does the tool perform a task another resource or employee already has covered? This information will help you assess replacement tools with a finer lens.

Candidates

While it’s not appropriate to directly discuss the company’s finances with candidates, they can provide valuable feedback about their candidate experience. This information is invaluable when considering the impact of certain hiring tools.

Request candidates fill out a survey at the end of the hiring process. Focus on whether they felt supported and at ease. If there are any steps of the process they were frustrated or confused by, dig deeper to see what can be cost-effectively improved upon.

For instance, communication has a huge impact on the candidate experience. Candidates need access to information and an easy way to ask additional questions. Many companies use automated email tools or chatbots to save hiring managers time. But those tools aren’t worthwhile if they confuse candidates or don’t communicate efficiently.

If that’s the case, be open to different solutions. You need to look at where the use of automated communication tools is straining the candidate experience. For example, instead of using a tool to send out dozens of emails, have your hiring managers focus on communicating with a smaller number of candidates directly.

Manually engaging with job seekers might seem passe in this technical age, but if it leads to meaningful communications that allow hiring managers to effectively land top candidates while directing hiring budget funds to the most valuable resources, the shift is well worth it.