Many sports teams are only as good as the players or athletes that they put onto the field of play. Likewise, most businesses are only as effective as the professionals working for them. Investing in recruiting the right talent for your organization is your chance to find people who fit in right for the long-term instead of just the help you need to fill positions now. The investment is well worth it, but that doesn’t mean you should waste endless money on it. Knowing how to save big when hunting for more hands for your biz pays off.
How to Save Money When Finding More Hands for Your Business
The more help you have in your business, the more money you can hopefully make. Still, try and save money when looking for your new staff.
- Identify Your Acquisition Costs: The cost for hiring an employee might range from $2,000 up to $13,000. Write down a list of all your individual acquisition costs so you can see which ones you might streamline into cheaper options.
- Find Your Best Acquisition Channels: General job boards might be where you start, but specialist recruiters can narrow the field faster.
- Automate Manual Tasks: Application alerts, disqualification emails, and scanning applications for keywords can all be done through technology and save you the payroll costs of manual labor.
- Embrace Collaborative Hiring: Make sure that all stakeholders involved in the hiring process are part of the same team and work cohesively. Otherwise, communication between all parties can start taking longer and longer.
- Promote From Within: Whenever possible, promote from within your current team. They already know the company culture. Entry-level workers are cheaper to train.
- Utilize Employee Referrals: Your own team members can be great recruiting tools.
Find Exactly What You Need
Why waste time looking for candidates that are near-misses or don’t even match what you’re specifically looking for? If you know exactly what kind of training or certifications you want applicants to have for a particular position, then you can use an agency that has the staffing resources to filter their databases and give you only the names of prospects that have the specific certifications you require for particular openings.
There is no sense in wasting resources on people who aren’t ready to get going on day one. When you find people you can plug and play, you don’t have to do any training for them for that role.
4 Additional Ways to Cut HR Costs
If the idea of saving money on recruitment specifically appeals to you, then you should consider doing everything you can to curtail your HR expenses, too. Entrepreneur has some suggestions of where to start.
- Ditch Paper Documents: Digital operations have become the norm for most businesses, but not all of them have walked away from paper documents entirely. A centralized HR digital platform can immediately spare your business ongoing printing charges. However, you should also notice increases in accuracy and efficiency.
- An Eye on Employee Wellness: Employee wellness programs and benefits might be an investment at first. However, anything that contributes to their health and happiness improves their work-life balance. Eventually, your retention rate will go up.
- Career Advancement: Learning and development keep employees engaged and positive. Identify the employees you have who bond well with others, as they can be teachers and mentors for a fraction of the costs of webinars and seminars.
- Perks and Benefits: Balance affordability with effectiveness to make your small business a destination for prospective job candidates. Whenever possible, include employee voting as an influence in the decision-making process.
Paying Before You Pay
It might seem crazy that you have to spend money trying to find people you’re going to wind up paying every week anyway. However, this economy is one where employees are moving from company to company like never before. If you want the right talent, you need to invest in recruitment and headhunting techniques that bring in prospects. That doesn’t mean you have to waste your money though. Just remember through all of this that its competitive wages, benefits, and organizational culture will actually keep recruits around.