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Photo by Resume Genius on Unsplash
How much do you think it costs to recruit one employee? You’ve got a few seconds to come up with your guesses before the grand reveal.
If you guessed just over $4500 per hire, then you’re right! This includes the cost of posting job adverts, interviewing candidates, handling job applications, and onboarding. For a small business with only 5 employees, you’re spending close to $25,000 on recruitment alone – and that’s not even adding the cost of paying your employees!
In an ideal world, you want to get the recruitment costs as low as possible. Well, here’s one simple trick that will help you do that, so you spend less money hiring people:
Hire the ideal candidates for each job!
Yes, it’s genuinely as simple as that. The right hires will mean you spend less money recruiting people, and less money onboarding them. It also reduces the chances of having to let people go after a short trial period, so you’re not wasting recruitment money.
How do you ensure the right candidates are found for each role? We’ve got a few simple alterations and ideas to implement throughout the recruitment process that should help:
Be Very Restrictive With Your Job Adverts
Never make open-ended job adverts that encourage loads of candidates to apply. Sure, you want to cast your net pretty far and wide, but you want the candidates to be a good fit for the role. So, get specific when it comes to the essential requirements for each job.
Ensure you have strict rules for who can apply for this job and who will be ignored. It should deter underqualified or under-experienced workers from applying, so you’re left with the perfect talent pool.
If some people apply without meeting these requirements, you can easily cast them aside. It sounds harsh, but you’ll end up wasting money entertaining these job applications when you know they’re not realistically going to be the ideal fit for the job.
Implement Job Application Forms For Further Filtering
Instead of only making people send a resume and cover letter, you should create a job application form. This will include a few key questions relating to the advertised role. It’s a chance for the candidate to show off their knowledge – and for you to see who’s worthy of getting an interview.
Ask scenario-based questions relating to the job, giving you an idea of how each candidate might respond to different situations. It’s another quick way of filtering out the “bad” candidates, leaving you with the good ones.
Ask The Right Questions In Interviews
You must ask the right questions when interviewing candidates. This is where many businesses – particularly small startups – go wrong. You ask bad questions and don’t learn enough about the candidate’s capabilities.
It’s useful to research the best interview questions for startups, so you have a list of things to ask. Their resume should tell you about their skills and experience, but it’s handy to know more. Dig into elements of their resume that you’d like to know more about – such as their specific roles or duties at their current place of work.
Also, don’t neglect questions relating to your business. Ask them things to do with your company culture or core ethos. See if they’d be a good fit for your business and can align with your brand image. You should conclude every interview feeling like you know as much as possible about every candidate. This puts you in the best position to make a judgment call and hire the right person for the job.
Hire Candidates With Relevant Experience
Lastly, try your best to hire people with relevant experience in your roles. Effectively, if you’re using a certain web program or application, it helps to hire people who are well-versed in this. It means the onboarding process is much easier and less costly.
In an ideal world, you don’t want to spend a fortune training new employees and teaching them how to use things from scratch. If someone can slot in and get up to speed immediately, it saves so much cash.
Hiring the wrong candidates can set your business back. You’ll need to bounce back from the financial strain of hiring someone who didn’t work out. It’s incredibly costly and makes it all the more critical to hire the ideal people on your first attempt. The goal is to whittle down the candidates to a small group for interviews. The fewer people you interview, the cheaper the recruitment process will be. Of course, it’s still on you to hire the right person!