In 2018, Recruitment Marketing is hitting its stride. More HR departments are recognizing the strategic value of using a talent pipeline model for vetting and hiring.
While HR is buying into the value of Recruitment Marketing, selling the C-suite on the cost of time spent, strategies implemented, and technology needed can be a tough sell. Here’s some information that may help inform leadership about the financial value of Recruitment Marketing in 2018:
Outdated hiring methods increase time to fill and attrition rates
What HR often fails to consider is that their own methodologies for hiring are prolonging the time to hire. One of the biggest issues: sourcing is reactive to when a job opens. Trying to fill a new role without a talent pipeline inevitably requires more resources to source talent and lengthens time to fill, given the diminishing pool of active, skilled candidates.
With the pressure on to fill the role, HR is often less able to actively pursue an alignment of candidate and organizational goals as they contend with fewer options for whom to hire. At the end of the day, this hiring methodology leads to a much higher risk of candidate misalignment that can lead to increased turnover that contributes to more frequent hiring and greater costs.
No matter how the situation is faced, the old model for reactive hiring is limiting organizational potential while putting HR in a cost control battle it just cannot win.
Reactive recruiting decreases your competitive position and increases recruiting costs
In 2017, Aberdeen found that 84% of Best-in-Class companies struggle from a failure to recruit top-quality talent.
Looking at the employment cost of this, Aberdeen’s data shows that low-quality talent is shortening the employee lifecycle to a one to two-year engagement. In Recruitment Marketing: Getting to the Inbound Candidate (December 2017) Aberdeen found that, while the shortened employee lifecycle is not significant news, considering talent quality as an added reason for turnover is new.
When combined with the 39% of talent that Aberdeen has found leaves a company on their own terms, a failed strategic match between candidates and organizations is a massive problem. In fact, for 25% of companies, this led to an increase in expected spend in talent management and applicant tracking systems to handle the increase in turnover.
In Hiring Tomorrow’s Workforce Today: The Talent Pipeline (January 2018), Aberdeen found that Best-in-Class companies are improving their results using Recruitment Marketing initiatives that build up a proactive talent pipeline.
Embracing Recruitment Marketing reduces time to fill and lowers hiring process costs
In 2017, Aberdeen found that the time to hire decreased for 20% of companies and the cost-per-hire decreased for 16% of companies. Aberdeen’s data shows that Recruitment Marketing and the transition to a talent pipeline model is a leading cause of time reduction.
Aberdeen also found that Recruitment Marketing reduced the cost of the hiring process by 20% or more for 24% of companies. Projecting this back to the total of companies realizing reduced hiring costs, Recruitment Marketing reduced the cost-per-hire for 30% of companies, accounting for a significant chunk of the cost savings Aberdeen saw in the hiring process.
In other words, developing a strategic employer brand while building and implementing a Recruitment Marketing plan to promote that brand to targeted candidate audiences is helping to reduce the cost impact of hiring by maintaining a more strategic use of internal hiring resources.
In summary, companies that do not update their hiring methodologies to include Recruitment Marketing and talent pipeline models will face increases in time to fill, attrition rates and overall cost of hiring as the competition for talent rises.
By contrast, adopters of Recruitment Marketing are able to increase their competitiveness in the hiring market. By adopting a proactive talent pipeline approach, these companies are able to decrease time-to-fill and cost-per-hire rates.
The reason for this observable cost benefit is that creating early alignment broadens the talent reach while eliminating certain recruitment stages by the time a position becomes available.
In this way, HR can reduce the cost impact of the hiring process on the organization by reducing the cost of sourcing, vetting and hiring. In the age of the ROI requirement, this means that organizational leadership has a critical piece missing from their hiring process if they continue to reactively hire and limit their Recruitment Marketing reach.
