Welcome to Recruiter Q&A, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers! Have a question you’d like to ask? Leave it in the comments, and you might just see it in the next installment of Recruiter Q&A!
Today’s Question: How do you keep hiring costs under control?
The answers below are provided by members of FounderSociety, an invitation-only organization comprised of ambitious startup founders and business owners.
1. Don’t Pinch Pennies
Hiring is not a place where we’re trying to pinch pennies. After all, the most costly mistake we can make is hiring the wrong person. A sound hiring process is one of the best possible business investments.
Everyone says that they hire people to help grow their business, but very few people make the effort to measure their desired outcomes. Whether the goal is to get a salesperson to bring in new accounts or an ops person to make your business more efficient, measure that dollar value and make it clear to the person you’re hiring that you want to see an ROI.
3. Outsource Anything Outside of Your Core Business
At Aligned Signs, we like to do what we are good at – self-awareness and social networking. Anything that is outside of the core business, short-term, or routine, we like to outsource. This way, we stay focused on improving what we do best.
Don’t spend thousands of dollars on sites like Monster just to receive 500 unqualified responses. Hiring these days can be a lot more interactive, personal, and affordable, thanks to social media. We were recently looking to add someone to our accounting team. After spending just 10 minutes writing a post on Facebook, we were referred to the perfect candidate.
We’ve found it is really valuable to hire internal staff that we can trust, but as an agency, our workload can be unpredictable. That’s why we supplement a small core of full-time staff members with part-time employees who are generally able to scale to meet our needs based on what we have coming in at any given time.
Make your organization the kind of place where people want to keep working. Few things drive up hiring costs faster than high turnover rates.
In my experience, turnover is very often the result of managerial failure. By making sure your employees are all satisfied and happy to be working with you, you can retain your current talent and focus on filling skills gaps elsewhere in your business.
