How to Reduce your Cost-Per-Hire

Well, folks. It is official. The standard, which has been over 2 years in the making, has been set for cost-per-hire. That’s right. This week cost-per-hire has been approved as an American National Standard. According to Jeremy Shapiro, the cost-per-hire workgroup chairman and executive director of Morgan Stanley, “The team wanted to create a standard that would be both accepted by the CFO’s office and practical to implement by HR. I think we hit the mark.”

It is critical to know what you are currently spending so that you will know if the things you are doing to cut back are actually working

The standard figures in many different factors for example advertising, candidate travel, and recruiter salaries. Some trickier items such as how to handle commissions, when to include employee referral fees and even how to account for general office expenses are also included. Yes, the document explaining the standard is over 37 pages but if used it can help compare across companies and can be compared to other companies within the same industry.

Not everyone is required to adopt the new standard and many organizations might find it a little difficult to implement such a standard but would still like to know how to reduce their cost-per-hire. This article lays out a few ways to trim this number back.

Audit your current process

It is critical to know what you are currently spending so that you will know if the things you are doing to cut back are actually working.

Use your website

The best way is to set up a dedicated career site as part of your company website and post your jobs there. If you use ApplicantPro hiring software, a branded career site is set up for you as part of our standard offering.

Protect your talent pool

In the article it talks about the importance of communicating with your applicant pool. Read more on this here. It also touches on creating a passive applicant pool. We talk about this in our webinarsbut it is important to gather the information on applicants even if you don’t have a current job opening. With ApplicantPro, you can set up an RSS feed where your applicants can subscribe to receive future job listings. Just turn it on and we take care of the rest.

Use social media

Using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter give you a huge bang for your buck. You can contact a huge number of people in a very cost effective way, most of the time for free. ApplicantPro automates this process as part of our push to job board feature. Once your job posting is written, you can push your job to many job boards and social media outlets.

Screen your candidates online

There are many ways to do this from writing a very detailed job listing, to asking screening questions in the application, to providing hiring assessment tests to your applicants. No matter what you choose, prescreening your applicants means less wasted time with unqualified applicants. Automating this process with an applicant tracking system will save the most time since a system like ApplicantPro will screen applicants automatically for you based on your one time set up.

Measure your results

Just like on our first step, if you don’t measure and compare to your initial results, you will not know if the things you are doing truly are making a difference.

To learn more about how ApplicantPro can automate many parts of your hiring process and reduce your cost-per-hire, please contact us today.