How to Hire on a Tight Budget

You’ve probably noticed that costs are going up. Inflation rates are on the rise. The cost-of-living is soaring. Everything everywhere is becoming more expensive. So, it can be no surprise that recruitment costs are also increasing; the price of using job boards has risen by as much as 300%, at a time when many recruitment budgets are being slashed. Across some sectors there is a growing hesitancy to recruit much further as the threat of recession looms.

But amidst these escalating prices and growing concerns, many businesses are still searching for new hires. There have been more job vacancies than unemployed people in the UK this year. Recruitment costs are not deterring hiring managers and talent acquisition teams from searching for the right applicants. But they are forcing organisations to be smarter about their recruitment process; encouraging businesses to search for ways to reduce their cost-per-hire.

For businesses operating on tighter recruitment budgets, there is a pressing need to find more cost-effective ways to hire new staff. So, how can companies save money on recruitment? The short answer is, invest in recruitment software, such as an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). For the longer answer, let’s look at how an ATS can help to reduce the cost of recruitment.

Reducing Recruitment Costs with an ATS

There are numerous ways for businesses to use an ATS to cut recruitment costs. With a central database, organisations can manage candidates, jobs, workflows, and data, strengthening existing recruitment processes. An ATS provides more cost-effective solutions to typical recruitment challenges, reducing the administrative burden on recruitment teams, freeing up time for other productive tasks.

With hiring managers and talent acquisition teams facing increasing pressure to find low-cost ways of improving recruitment, onboarding, and retention, an Applicant Tracking System provides employers with the tools hire more effectively and more efficiently.

Automate Hiring Processes

One of the major benefits of recruitment software such as an ATS, is that provides organisations with the ability to automate away certain steps during the recruitment process.

Instead of requiring your recruitment team to sift through copious CVs, the candidate screening tool in the Hireserve ATS allows recruiters to quickly eliminate applicants that aren’t right for the role or a bad fit for your organisation.

This also includes the ‘Killer Questions’ tool, which triggers questions that result in automatic rejection if candidates give the wrong yes/no answer to the requirement.

Automated emails can be triggered to be sent to candidates during every step of the application process, keeping them engaged and informed about what is required of them and the next steps.

Maintaining a consistent, automatic stream of communication is key to keep applicants engaged in the hiring process, and delivers a better candidate experience overall, without requiring time and resources to be spent keeping in touch with every single potential new hire.

Typically, these are process that can be a huge drain on in-house resources and a hiring manager’s time, but this can be streamlined with the right recruiting software.

Develop your Talent Pipeline

A talent pipeline, or talent pool, is a database of candidates with the necessary skills and experience to work for your organisation.

Hireserve ATS contains features to help you manage this talent pool and automate much of the process of building out this database. Create talent pools based on specific criteria including skills, experience, or location, and engage with students and graduates who represent the future of the workforce.

Social media channels such as LinkedIn can be used to source passive candidates – those who are not currently looking for a job – as well as manage your previous applicants.  Automate communication with these candidates, staying in touch and remaining on their mind. Candidates can also update their information themselves through the candidate portal, so that reaching them is always straightforward.

Building out an effective talent pipeline can help organisations save money on advertising and marketing vacancies, and lead to faster sourcing of applicants, reducing both the cost and time-to-hire.

Better Utilise Job Boards & Social Media Channels

With certain jobsites putting their costs up, organisations are increasingly relying on free job boards to share their vacancies and reach potential applicants.

With an Applicant Tracking System, its even easier to efficiently ensure your job ads are in the right place. We are proud to be partnered with jobsites such as Indeed and the Hireserve ATS features multiple job board integrations, meaning that job vacancies can be instantly posted across different sites automatically when you post a job to your own career’s site.

Additionally, Hireserve ATS is integrated with social media platforms, allowing you to similarly post jobs across different social channels simultaneously.

The Applicant Tracking System can also generate automated posts for company Twitter accounts, automatically sharing tweets promoting new job roles as soon as they are created.

Businesses have long understood the value of social media platforms in terms of cutting recruitment costs, with organisations reporting for years that the use of these channels can reduce costs by as much as 50%.

Yet there is also significant cost involved with having members of the recruitment team manually posting about different jobs across different platforms. Finding ways to remove that cost of human labour without sacrificing the reach providing from these channels is extremely valuable.

Adopt Remote Interviews

The rise in remote working has also seen a huge increase in remote interviewing. During the darkest times of the pandemic, face-to-face interviews were almost completely impossible for companies and candidates alike.

This shift towards digital interviewing has lost little momentum in the aftermath of COVID-19, and its easy to see why: businesses that utilise video interviews are almost 3 times more likely to have a lower cost-per-hire compared with businesses that continue to conduct interviews in-person.

The Hireserve platform includes the capability to conduct professional video interviews more efficiently. Using the Online Interview tool, recruiters can communicate easily with potential hires.

With the Hireserve ATS, hiring managers can generate a unique interview link which can be used for all interviews, removing the need to set up new and individual meetings over and over for every applicant you meet with, saving time and removing further administrative burden from the recruitment process.

Use Recruitment Analytics

The use of recruitment analytics has massive potential to improve hiring processes, leading businesses towards more cost-effective, data-driven decisions.

By tracking and measuring every step in the recruitment journey, organisations can gain valuable insight on how to optimise certain processes and see where time and money can be spent more efficiently.

There are numerous different metrics that can be tracked and finding the right metrics for your organisation will depend on many factors such as the size or goals of your company. Collecting and interpreting all this data can be overwhelming and understanding how to apply that data effectively is a skill itself.

With the wealth of reporting tools available in the Hireserve ATS, talent acquisition teams can easily keep track of the metrics that matter the most to their specific goals, and easily visualise that data through customisable dashboards.

These dashboards enable businesses to create engaging and accessible models for analytics, gain insight into their data patterns, and easily report against the metrics they are tracking. This allows organisations to easily identify bottlenecks in the recruitment process and remedy them, making hiring new staff cheaper and more efficient.

If you are looking to hire new talent and would like to learn more about how Hireserve can boost your recruitment, book a demo today.