Are you outsourcing your talent acquisition to external recruiters? Maybe you believe that there’s not enough time to hire in-house or you don’t even want to bother so you get someone else can do it for you.
There are times when an external recruiter can be an indispensable resource to your company, such as when you need to hire for confidential roles, roles that need to be filled ASAP or super niche roles that are hard to fill. However, beyond those scenarios, you should hire internally.
Stop taking the easy way out!
Here’s how you can improve your talent acquisition strategy in-house and save precious time and money that could be spent on other aspects of the business.
1. Know Your Statistics
If you can’t identify the problem, how can you fix it?
Employee referral is the number one way to hire talent – so ask yourself what is your employee referral rate? If you don’t know, that’s an issue.
Where do you look to get most of your talent? If you’re not just using external recruiters, how else do you hire?
How much money are you spending on recruiting fees? If HR doesn’t know, that’s a huge red flag. Work with your CFO and your accounting and finance staff to figure it out.
Let me tell you a story about an experience I had a few years ago. A company I worked with had spent $600-700k in 9 months to recruit for their open positions. To put this into perspective, the company’s annual gross revenue was $13 million. They were essentially bleeding money by hiring external recruiters, which meant they couldn’t spend money on other things like bonuses for their best-performing engineers.
When I helped them reduce recruiting fees to $40,000 over 2 years…well, you can only imagine how happy everyone was! They spent the money saved on bonuses, among other things, and it boosted morale and showed their employees the company appreciated them.
2. Your Recruiters Should Stop Posting Cookie-Cutter Job Ads
Your recruiters and HR team shouldn’t be employing the blocking and tackling method of recruiting. They must be able to advertise a job that’s appealing enough to attract top talent. If your job descriptions are boring like 95% of job ads out there, you’ll likely bring in mediocre candidates. Use candidate attraction ads instead. In order for them to do this, however, they must truly understand the roles they’re filling instead of just learning the basics, like years of experience and hard skills.
3. A Great Recruiter Can Hire for Almost Any Type of Role
If your recruiters and HR people are looking at certain roles and saying, “I don’t think I can hire for this role because I’ve never done it before. Let’s hire a third-party recruiter,” then you might need to think about hiring new in-house recruiters. A great recruiter will be able to figure out how to hire for pretty much any role.
That person should be integrated into your business and make the effort to truly understand the company’s culture. The best recruiters I know will learn that information extremely quickly. I’ve even met entry-level recruiters that are able to do this because they have that drive and innate ability to market your company to top talent.
4. Develop Your Recruiting Department
Many CEOs say that finding top talent is the #1 thing that keeps them up at night, but at the same time, I’m seeing HR departments that are grossly understaffed. Some recruiters have anywhere from 20-70 job openings to fill on top of being in charge of the onboarding process. That’s insane!
Not very many HR leaders are great at talent acquisition. I believe that if you’re a small company, you need to find an HR leader that has a firm grasp on the entire scope of Human Resources. The best of the best are great at building out talent management, managing employee relations, can manage benefits and are great at talent acquisition. I’ll be honest, this isn’t an easy skill set to find, but these people are out there.
As a former HR leader, I can’t tell you how important it is that you avoid taking the easy way out by outsourcing talent acquisition. You’re spending way too much money, especially in challenging times like these. Make sure HR is being held accountable by looking at the stats, building a strong employee referral culture, using candidate attraction ads (not boring job ads) and ensure that their departments are staffed with the right people.
Are you having trouble attracting top talent? I’ll take away the headaches with recruiting while saving your company time and money.
