How to ace your recruitment efforts even with a tight budget

Recruitment can quickly become a long and expensive process if you don’t streamline your approach and manage your budget effectively. 

And yes, even companies with a tight budget find the best candidates!

So instead of wasting time, and money on dead-end recruitment efforts, use these tips to hire effectively even if you’re on a tight recruitment budget. 

5 steps to optimizing your recruitment budget

1. Assess your recruitment budget

Typical expenses incurred during recruitment include:

• Internal or external recruiter salaries
• Recruitment software services
• Marketing and job board fees
• Referral program rewards
• Background checks
• Interview costs

Note: Make sure you’re using the best business phone systems(opens in a new tab) so that remote hiring processes, such as video interviews and conference calls, don’t cut your budget.

2. Track and analyze your recruitment process

Some metrics you should consider monitoring include:

• Cost per hire
• Sources of hire (e.g., LinkedIn, referrals)
• Time taken to fill the role 
• Time spent on recruitment 
• Applicants per hire
• Offer acceptance rate
• Retention rate

3. Use digital recruitment channels

To reduce your dependency on paid platforms, you should make the most of social media hiring. After all, a survey found that 86% of job seekers (opens in a new tab)use social media for their search. 

Social media posts also allow you to personalize your job advertisement, and show off your company culture. 

Make sure your job posting on social media includes:

• Job duties
• Salary, benefits, and perks
• Images of your staff and workplace
• Visual branding in line with your company
• A clear call to action

With the right conference call company, you can ensure that calls and video interviews are considerably cheaper than expenses incurred on paying candidates to travel to your office.

4. Perfect your interviews

With 41% of recruiters(opens in a new tab) struggling to assess candidates in interviews, you must have a straightforward, standardized interview process that will help you choose the right candidate and increase employee retention. 

Conducting effective interviews will help you better assess candidates' skills and show your company culture. 

Here are some tips for running interviews that’ll benefit both you and your candidates:

• Prepare your questions in line with the applicant. Rather than asking vague questions unrelated to the role or your company, prepare focused questions that align with the specifications you’re looking for in the candidate and your company values. 

• Ask open-ended ‘opportunity’ questions. Don’t search for specific answers from candidates. Ask questions that allow them to talk about themselves and their experiences.

• Prepare the candidate. Expecting candidates to interview blind doesn’t help them or you. Instead, send the candidate details of what to expect from the interview, what you expect from them, and a timeframe. 

• Explain the job and your company at the start of the interview. By reiterating the job description and the details of your company, you and the candidate can focus on specifics and respond directly to the role required. 
• Create a broad interview panel. Assemble a diverse interview panel to ensure a more comprehensive assessment of candidates, reduce bias, and promote better decision-making. 

5. Leverage talent of internal hires and referral programs

During the hiring process, start by looking internally. Consider setting up an employee mobility program and training programs to upskill your employees and prepare them for potential promotions. 

Employee referral programs are a great way to leverage your existing employees and cut costs. 

Referred employees often have better retention rates and a lower cost-per-hire, making 88% of employers(opens in a new tab) believe that referrals are the best source for new employees. 

A lot of companies offer cash rewards for referrals, but there are some alternative referral rewards you could implement to cut costs, including:

• Extra vacation days
• Educational or practical courses
• Gift cards and meal vouchers
• ‘Experience’ gifts
• Donations to the charity of the employee’s choice(opens in a new tab)
• In-kind donations(opens in a new tab) to causes employees care about

But if you have a centralized platform to manage your entire recruitment process, you can save a significant amount of resources. With Recruit CRM, you can leverage a streamlined applicant tracking system to store, manage, and track your recruitment data in one place. 

Recruitment should be like any other part of your business — you carefully monitor, analyze, and budget for every step of the process.  

Author:

Grace Lau - Director of Growth Content, Dialpad

Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad. Dialpad contact center software(opens in a new tab) is an AI-powered cloud communication platform for better and easier team collaboration. She has over ten years of experience in content writing and strategy. Currently, she leads branded and editorial content strategies, partnering with SEO and Ops teams to build and nurture content. Grace Lau also published articles for domains such as WebSitePulse(opens in a new tab) and Codemotion(opens in a new tab). 

Here is her LinkedIn(opens in a new tab).