Hiring great talent comes at a huge cost to small-medium sized businesses (SMBs).
According to Chandler Macleod, in Australia it takes on average 81 days and $15,000 to place a candidate – this is a huge cost to any business and we believe these figures are substantially higher for smaller organisations.
Time is critical for SMBs so it’s important they employee the right candidate. A wrong hire can cause damage to the culture of the organisation and have a far greater impact than it would do in a larger organisation with extensive HR processes.
Yet SMBs can help ease these pressures by becoming more active in the processes they use to hire talent and recruiting on their own terms. For smaller organisations, it’s important to prioritise HR improvements that will deliver the greatest return on investment as it can be challenging to develop processes that may not in fact warrant the effort.
To start with, we recommend a staff incentive scheme that rewards existing employees for recommending or recruiting talent. This may seem like a simple step but many organisations still don’t have a policy in place. We believe this is a great way to spread the procurement load.
It’s also worth engaging managers within the business in the recruitment process as they hold key relationships with candidates. So ask employees to share the information about the position throughout their own network and broadcast the job ad on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Once SMBs have engaged their own networks, we recommend considering the value recruiters can bring to the process. SMBs can often find it challenging to build brand awareness within the employment market about the roles and opportunities they have available. So it’s a good idea to engage recruiters, which have strong relationships with the right talent and an established reputation and network relevant candidates.
To help get the best out of the recruiter, keep in mind that they may bundle their services so you can often pay for things you don’t require. We recommend engaging recruiters just in areas that you’re struggling with. This might be just asking them to provide you with 10 suitable CVs which you can then screen yourself.
To give you an example of a company that is engaging recruiters on its own terms, the Australian company Atlassian has a policy whereby it only uses recruiters that can successfully place one in three of the candidates that it initially recommends. This ensures that it’s only working with recruiters that have the right networks and it’s not paying for additional services.
We know the existing hiring model is taking too long to recruit the right candidates and this is holding SMBs back from achieving their business goals and making it more challenging to compete with large businesses. Taking steps to actively evolve the HR process by using the business’s networks and engaging the services of recruiters on your own terms will make it easier to hire better candidates when you need them.
Author: Jamie Carlisle, CEO – The Search Party
