Josh TolanYou work diligently to attract, hire, and retain top talent in spite of the restraints of your thin or exhausted hiring budget. And you’re not alone. Only 21% of hiring professionals in our How to Make the Most of Your Hiring Budget report say they are able to stay on budget. And to make matters worse, they make tremendous sacrifices to do so.
Generally speaking, sacrifices in the hiring process lead to corners cut, which means the quality of talent in your pipeline declines. As a result, productivity, retention, and overall employee satisfaction also drop.
Unfortunately, HR and talent acquisition pros on your team must stretch their hiring budgets even further. And experts cannot always predict the health of the talent market or economy before disaster strikes. This means, your hiring team may have to find ways to fill open roles on a maxed-out budget and brace for an even tighter budget.
For this reason, we’ve pulled together a few tips to help you stretch your hiring budget without letting the quality of talent slip in your hiring process:
1. Optimize free social media recruiting
Back in 2017, 44% of hiring pros revealed they considered adding social media to their hiring strategies in our 2018 Growth Hiring Trends In the United States report.
It turns out, their instincts were right. Social media continues to grow in popularity on the job search front.
Social media is an effective way to reach a wide variety of candidates through networking, branding and making job applications easily accessible. The trick, however, is cutting through the noise to find the right potential candidates in a sea of 4.26 billion social media users.
Join niche social media groups where candidates with the necessary qualifications spend their time. For example, if you’re looking for a social media manager, join LinkedIn’s SocialMediaopolis to find experts.
While researching and joining niche groups, look to popular hashtags. This ensures your posts aren’t hidden in busy feeds and reach the potential candidates you want in your pipeline.
2. Turn to employee referrals
Your employees are a trusted resource for finding top talent. Encourage and incentivize employees to share job openings as employer brand ambassadors. Offer non-financial related incentives when hiring budgets are tight, such as an extra PTO day or the ability to leave early every Friday for a month.
To earn quality employee referrals, go beyond incentives and make referrals a valued part of the company culture. Instill the value of attracting and hiring new talent early on by making it part of everyone’s job description. Continue to celebrate their contributions to helping the company move into a bright new future as successful new talent is brought to the table.
3. Spend time in your talent library
Your talent library is always accessible. But in the constant, demanding cycle of attracting, hiring, and onboarding talent, it’s sometimes challenging to remember to stop and reassess this talent pool. Instead, you move right into sourcing to fill the next job opening almost as if on auto-pilot.
Set time aside each month to assess and reorganize your talent library. Create a list of ‘silver medalist’ candidates who didn’t quite make the cut for past roles. As you reassess, begin to network with those who were most promising to understand where they are at this stage of their careers and what type of employment they’re interested in now.
4. Decrease the total number of in-person interviews per candidate
In-person interviews are a crucial part of your hiring process. However, they’re more cost-effective when used strategically and at just the right moment. When an excessive number of in-person interviews are required, your hiring team gets wrapped up in time-consuming and costly procedures.
It’s especially important to tighten your in-person interview budget if your hiring data reveals candidates frequently exit during this stage. There is a magic number according to LinkedIn’s Inside the Mind of Today’s Candidate report. On average, their research revealed candidates that who are satisfied with their interview experience (84%) come in for a total of three interviews.
Determine the number of in-person interviews that are necessary and cost-effective for your hiring team to reach the most informed decisions. Then structure your interview process to include live video interviews to increase the value and decrease the cost of in-person interviews.
This is a great way to streamline the early stages of the interview process. You can ask candidates soft skills, cultural fit, and goal-related questions to determine if they should move further into the hiring process, saving your team valuable resources by filtering through only the best-fit candidates.
Guest Post
