The Hidden Costs To Managing The Hiring Process Yourself
For any company, expansion is excellent! It shows that what you are doing, you are doing right. Your client/customer base has increased; therefore, your workload has increased, and therefore, your employees also need to increase. Simple right? Wrong!
Did you know that the average cost per hire in the UK is about £3,000? (According to the Society for Human Resource Management. Of course, this number will vary depending on the job title, the salary, the training required, the interview process, the company core values of holiday entitlement/bonuses, and so forth…
There are many hidden costs and requirements when it comes to the recruitment process. Many companies now realise that the expenses from managing the hiring process yourself, are quite frankly, not worth it! It can take up precious time and can drain valuable financial resources from the company, resulting in your “expansion of staff” feeling like taking 10 steps backwards.
We want to break it down for you into a step-by-step evaluation of the time and costs that people don’t think to consider when hiring employees.
- Creating The Job Ad
Do you have the skills in-house to produce the job application advertisement? If you do, then brilliant, but remember, creating a great ad takes much time out of your day or week, and can result in profitable work not getting done in the time frame required. Creating the job spec to high quality is crucial for attracting the right candidate for the job. If you’re looking for someone with a high skill set and lots of experience, they will be looking for a company that offers progression and stability, and with a basic and messy ad, you will not be presenting yourself correctly to the right people.
- Executing The Job Ad
There are endless job search sites now available (Indeed, Total Jobs, Jobsite, Monster, CV-Library, Reed, GlassDoor, CareerBuilder, Fish4… the list goes on). It costs money to place your ad and receive maximum visibility on these sites; for example, most websites start at £5 per day to place an ad. We recommend an advertisement being placed for 30-60 days, giving a minimum of £150 PER JOB SITE. However, will you be at the top of the job list for this price? Probably not! 9,966 jobs were added to Reed in the past 24 hours alone, so unless your targeting is on point, you’re just as swallowed up as the job hunters are themselves.
When paying a MINIMUM £150 PER JOB AD, you must be clear as to which websites are best to find the employee you want. Does the site receive traffic related to your industry? Are the potential searchers the kind of people you are looking for? Are they active or passive job seekers? Is it a niche job board, targeting teachers, doctors, or maybe even hairdressers? Does the site only advertise hourly positions or target seasonal hires?
The questions to consider go on and on, once again taking up valuable time and resources from the day-to-day running of your company. So, choosing where to place your ad can be a complex and daunting process to work out by yourselves.
We would also like to point out, do you have a “vacancies” section on your website? Getting your web designer to update this will usually cost anything from £30 upwards.
Are you stressed yet? It’s not over!
- Collecting results and choosing correct candidates
So you’ve received 100’s (if not 1000’s) of CVs, you now have to go through them individually to find the best matches for your job role. Do you have software in place to identify keywords within the applicants’ curriculum vitae? If you do, then you know that this costs money. If you don’t, then the money will be pretty much equivalent or more when you work out the time spent and cost of wages analysing potential candidates CVs. To look through all the candidates can take anything from 10 hours to 10 days, it entirely depends on the role and the amount of interest.
- Organising and Attending Interviews
When holding the interviews, you firstly need to delegate the task to the correct department (whether that be HR or Head Office or Finance- it ultimately depends on your company size and the job role at hand). You then you need to schedule a time frame for this within theirs/your day. So dependant on your employees’ salary, you can determine how much this is going to cost.
OK, let’s say your member of staff in charge of the process earns £30k a year. They will spend a minimum of 10 hours reviewing the CV’s, 2 hours contacting and organising the possible interviewees, and roughly 10 hours for the official interview with the candidates. To calculate how much this would cost you, firstly calculate their hourly salary (£30,000 / 48 Work Weeks a Year / 35 Hours a Week = £17.86), and then multiply this by the hours spent (which for this example are 20) — resulting in the salary cost of £357.14 Per member of staff involved in the process.
- Employee Referrals
Another sneaky cost that many businesses forget to consider. Employee referrals are very popular, especially in medium to large enterprises. It can be an excellent scheme to implement into your company as it skips many areas of the recruitment process and as a worker, you would not want to offer over a potential new employee unless you felt they fit your company culture and job role at hand. However, whether it’s a cash bonus, a bottle of wine, or a trip away, whatever it is, it is going to cost you money to enthuse people to make referrals!
- Reference & Background Checks Costs
As you come to the final decision stages, background and reference checks are so important and regularly missed. Businesses disregard them because THEY COST MONEY. When managing the hiring process yourself, the bills stack up, and suddenly you begin to cut corners to try and save those last pennies. You rush the process and miss out final consideration that could determine the candidate you choose.
So the long and short of it is, you can see why most companies head to recruitment agency’s to help with the process.
With highly trained staff sourcing out the best candidates for any job role, the risk of you wasting your time with invaluable people is much less. It also means that the current employees you have can get on with their day to day job roles, ensuring your business runs smoothly as ever without interruptions.
What we offer
We go above and beyond at Recruitment 99 to support businesses to navigate the recruitment maze. Following a strategic recruitment process enables us to quickly identify not only the right experience and qualifications but also the correct skillset and personality suited to your company.
How do we do this we hear you ask?
We will take the time to gain a full insight into your company objectives and values, finding out exactly who you are looking for. We assess potential candidates for you taking time off your hands and making sure they are an excellent fit for your company, with organisational values and with the experience, professional qualifications and qualities you require.
Our dedicated and passionate team take in experience in various industries, meaning we understand the skills needed to excel in a broad range of roles and businesses. We know that recruitment doesn’t end with the getting someone in post, so we will continue to work to maintain the relationship with both your company and the new employee, doing all we can to help.
Areas we cover:
- Free consultation
- CV Building
- Interview Skills
- Career advice
- Candidate Sourcing
- Temporary placements
- Permanent Placements
Our hard work in filling vacancies is in your best interest; we want you to be able to get on with your day-to-day tasks without the worry and stress of hiring staff. We are here to remove the overly expensive costs of recruiting in-house!