Today’s hiring landscape is incredibly competitive and expensive. According to the Society of Human Resource Management, the average cost of hiring a new employee in 2022 is $4700! It can go as high as $18000 for executive hires. Cost per hire has been steadily increasing over the years. Additionally, the average recruiter salary increased by 14% from 2020 to 2021, which is one of the highest compensation increases of any profession.
As you begin to plan for your talent acquisition budget for 2023, it might be tempting to increase the job board spending and hire more recruiters to keep up with the hiring goals. But in a constantly evolving hiring landscape, throwing money at the problem isn’t a scalable solution.
Keeping up with ambitious hiring goals doesn’t have to come with high costs. Let’s look at some tips to reduce talent acquisition costs without compromising on the candidate quality and experience.
Here’s how leading talent acquisition teams are sourcing and engaging candidates while keeping the cost per hire in check.
Is your ATS database updated and trustworthy? If not, your recruiting team has no option but to turn to more expensive, poorly targeted inbound resources like job boards or spin their wheels on time-consuming outbound efforts. Neither of these is scalable or cost-effective. But if your database is up-to-date, you can tap into a network of talent you’ve already paid for, pre-screened, or even hired previously.
That said, keeping your ATS database updated is easier said than done. Thousands of candidates in your database constantly change jobs, skills, phone numbers, and email addresses. Leading companies leverage automation to turn their ATS into a self-cleaning, self-generating sourcing machine. With automation, you can reach out to candidates at scale and auto-update the ATS data periodically to ensure your recruiting teams always have the most updated candidate pool to source from.
You’ve spent a lot of time and resources on your candidate database. But 70% of talent in the ATS/CMS is inactive or dormant. Some candidates applied but were not interviewed; others interviewed but didn’t get the job, yet others refused the job because the offer was not attractive at the time. This passive candidate pool can be turned into a goldmine of talent.
With the help of modern recruiting technologies such as AI and automation, you can find dormant candidates in the ATS who are qualified for new roles. Here’s some of the data you can collect from passive talent using automated outreach at scale: Are they looking for work? Have they added new skills? Has their location changed? What type of role are they looking for?
In addition to lowering hiring costs, reactivating passive talent also helps engage already-interested candidates and enhances their experience.
Speaking of leveraging existing resources, employees and alumni can be excellent sourcing channels. In a competitive hiring environment, you need to beat the competition to get your candidate’s attention. Referrals from current candidates and alumni can help you do just that. Research shows that referred candidates are 5x more likely to be hired and 45% stay with the company for over 4 years.
Your employees and alumni know your company well: they tend to do a pre-qualification before they refer people, making your hiring team’s life a tad simpler. Referrals are far less ‘risky’ than a completely new applicant and they come at a much lower cost (up to 50%!) compared to what is currently spent on job boards and social networks.
Check out our six tips to boost employee referrals.
~75% of your recruiters’ time is spent on repetitive tasks such as sending reminders, syncing calendars, and rescheduling interviews. Instead of adding more recruiters to your team, you can help your existing recruiters enhance their productivity and efficiency. Automation should nearly eliminate the hours spent on these repetitive tasks, freeing them up to focus on more impactful tasks like creating a long-term hiring plan, building relationships with talent, and developing a diversity strategy.
With the help of a fully integrated talent engagement platform, you can implement multi-channel candidate reach outs, match candidates to jobs according to their profiles, and schedule interviews automatically. This saves a lot of recruiter hours. Companies that leverage automation have seen a 30-35% drop in acquisition costs.
Interested in how you can leverage AI and automation to slash costs, save time, and deliver delightful candidate experiences? Read our definitive guide to talent engagement to help you build a winning talent engagement strategy.
