How your recruitment journey affects your business performance
While it may outwardly appear to be simply a means to an end, the recruitment process is an integral part of your business. How you go about hiring new employees has a direct affect on your business’ performance – after all, it’s about the people you choose to run the day to day of the company.
From the hard facts such as cost, to the qualitative measures like staff morale, your recruitment journey reaches multiple parts of your business. By making changes both large and small to how you approach finding and choosing your next new hire, you can boost business performance and drive your company forward.
Cost and resource
Recruiting to fill a role can be costly, even before the new hire’s salary, training, and pension costs. From the moment there’s an empty desk to fill, through the stages for advertising, interviews, screening, and onboarding, to the moment the new employee is working at full capacity, costs in the tens of thousands are likely to mount up.
According to a CV-Library survey of 200 recruiters from both agency positions and in-house, the majority of businesses spend up to £10,000 per new hire for advertising, agency, or search fees alone. Factor in the operational costs, training expenses, and the resource that goes into the process, and your recruitment journey could be a significant cost to your business.
For business performance, reducing the costs of recruitment and the demand on internal resource is vital.
Building efficiencies in your recruitment journey
When the recruitment process is drawn out, inefficient, and overly complicated, the cost to hire in your business can quickly become a major drain on your internal resources. It’s therefore important to ensure that the process is as quick, effective, and as free of undue effort as possible.
Building automation within the recruitment process can work to make it more efficient. For instance, the use of AI when processing applications or CVs can cut recruitment times drastically, as well as ensure unconscious bias doesn’t creep into the selection process.
Outsourcing can also result in cost savings for the recruitment process. The whole process can be handled by a recruitment agency, or elements such as pre-employment screening, or advertising can be outsourced to specialist agencies.
Choosing the right candidate
It’s important to ensure that the person you hire is a good fit for the company. Making a poor hiring choice can impose significant costs on the company in terms of the original hiring expenses as well as re-hire costs, fees for a temporary worker to fill the position until a new employee is recruited, and the knock on effects of performance, team morale, and productivity. In fact, professional services network PwC calculates that the cost of a poor hiring choice can be 50-150% of the annual salary of the position.
Therefore, a thorough, carefully planned, and well executed recruitment process with a rigorous screening procedure is vital in order to ensure business performance is not affected by a bad hire.
Employer reputation and candidate experience
Having a strong reputation as an employer means you’re able to attract a wide range of candidates for your open positions, and therefore have more chance of hiring someone who can positively contribute to your business performance.
Your employer reputation depends on a number of factors, and is endorsed not only by your existing employees, but the unsuccessful candidates of your recruitment process. Those who have a good candidate experience are not only likely to tell their friends about upcoming job openings, but are also more likely to consider the business as a client.
Therefore, in order to build a team that is dedicated and able to drive your business forward, as well as attract new customers and widen your reach, it’s important that your recruitment journey upholds the image you want to convey just as much as your client-facing journeys.
Quick, considerate and efficient
No one appreciates having their time wasted, and expectations for speed and effectiveness are high in every area of life. Therefore, a swift and efficient recruitment process is important to ensure your candidates are not left feeling frustrated or forgotten.
Creating application forms that are accessible, simple to fill in, and not overly long, as well as ensuring they’re processed quickly and candidates are kept informed throughout the whole process, helps to make sure applicants feel valued.
Employee Investment
Performance is affected by the dedication and care that your team puts into their work. It’s important that employees feel motivated and invested in the business, and when the recruitment and onboarding processes are designed to inspire this, your business performance will benefit.
Thorough onboarding
Ensuring your new hires are prepared and excited to start work can be a process that begins well before the contract is signed. A recruitment process that reflects the company culture and makes clear the company values and mission is not only great for preparing your new employee, but also for spotlighting candidates that are a good fit for the company.
By also ensuring the onboarding process is thorough, you can help new employees feel more comfortable in their roles, within their teams, and as a part of the company, meaning they’re more likely to be working at full capacity sooner, and more confident in their work from the outset. This can bring knock-on benefits to business performance as a result.
At Reed Screening, we’re dedicated to making the recruitment journey as pain-free as possible to help our clients drive their businesses forward. Speak to our team today to find out how we can help to streamline and enhance your recruitment journey.