How to spend your recruitment budget wisely

You’d research, review and compare the different products available when buying a new washing machine so why wouldn’t you review your recruitment tech? Ensure you’re getting a top quality product for the best price and you could end up trimming your expenditure. It’s all about buying efficiently. If you have been weighing up whether to hire extra staff to cover the influx of candidates, it may be that investing in better tech to help manage the recruitment process is actually more cost effective.   

With redundancies rising and jobs still sluggish, the candidate pool has exploded. WaveTrackR data revealed that the first week of August saw applications skyrocket to 111% above the lockdown average and each job is receiving an average of over double the number of applications compare to the pre-lockdown months of 2020. Some jobs are experiencing literally thousands of applications where six months ago they might have received three or four. 

In some ways this is great for recruiters – suddenly you’ve got your pick of talent. But how do you find that talent amongst a deluge of applications? How do you manage them and how do you retain a positive candidate experience? The answer lies in a candidate management system that will help you to screen and filter all those applications to ensure you deliver the best talent to your client whilst keeping every candidate in the loop and all without overwhelming your workload.

With fewer jobs but more applicants, you may find you don’t need as many job board contracts, enabling you to reduce your annual spend. As candidates continue to join the pool, a couple of job boards could well bring in more than enough applications. Slimming down the number of boards you use to just the ones producing the right results might sound easier said than done but this is where either data-powered technology or experts can help. Utilising your multi-poster’s application and hire data and analytics allows you to see which job boards work better for your adverts.

You need to ensure you’re putting your money into the right places so consider who understands how best to utilise your budget, where is best to place your advert, and who can secure the best deals on your behalf. Who has the data in order to make intelligent decisions? It is essential to seek the expertise of those who can ensure you get the best return. It may be that you’re already saving money by reducing your advertising spend but want to invest it. If you want to push through but change the way you’re doing things by moving your money around, putting it somewhere that will give you a better return, then talk to someone who deals with recruitment media on a daily basis.  

If you’re not fully utilising your recruitment website, why not? Managed properly your website can – and should – play a part in your marketing strategy. As well as advertising your job listings, your website will strengthen your brand and bring clients and candidates to you via relevant and interesting content. Remember, listing jobs and publishing content on your own website is free!   

Data-powered recommendations help you to find which job boards give you the best ROI – literally helping you to spend your recruitment budget wisely. Using application and hire data you can see which board would best suit your job advert, taking the guesswork out of it. You can even see the performance of your job boards which makes budgeting and negotiating a far easier job. Data and analytics are essential when it comes to knowing how to spend your recruitment budget in the most efficient way.