When putting together your annual HR budget, it is all too easy to neglect Recruiting. Unlike other HR budgeting and planning exercises, there is not always a clear line between outlay and results. Many times, you may only notice the impact of spending too little on recruitment after the fact, and by then, it is far too late to go back and fix the problem.
According to Gartner, 30% of companies anticipate cutting their recruitment budgets for the coming year to help maintain costs. However, HR budgeting and planning analysis has revealed that a large part of this is due to lingering hiring freezes, which has reduced the recruitment needs for many companies.
Recruitment should remain a significant part of any HR department’s budget, especially when it can fold directly into hiring the best matches for a position. eSkill’s Talent Assessment PlatformTM offers an excellent return on your investment, helping you to reduce your time to hire while lowering your overall hiring costs.
Here are some ways you can build recruiting into your budget by including tools like skills tests.
Identify Your Needs for the Coming Year
The first step in budgeting is to consider and understand your end goals. For HR budgeting and planning, those goals are based on your current staffing level and insight into where the company needs to be by the end of the year.
Of course, it is not that simple. Staffing needs tend to change throughout the year. Your company may require seasonal staff during busy periods or temporary workers to fill gaps. Growth goals may change, and you might need to raise or lower your expectations of the number of staff members you need to hire.
Getting a firm handle on the number of positions you will need to fill, as well as the experience levels associated with those available positions, will help you determine what your targets should be for the coming year. This exercise provides the framework for establishing budget items, including recruitment.
Build a Wide, Deep Pool of Available Candidates
In recruiting, building relationships is everything. While the nature of those relationships has changed in the digital era, HR professionals still need to establish networks of potential candidates that they can turn to whenever an opening arises.
There are many ways that you can build your hiring pool. Attending hiring fairs and professional conferences works well, as can networking events within different groups and communities. Simply getting your open positions in front of the right eyes goes a long way, which is why posting to multiple job boards is vital.
One fundamental way to stretch your recruiting budget is to invest in assessment tools like eSkill. With an extensive library of job- and subject-related tests, you can either use these tools as they are or build your customized tests by combining assessments like Android Programmer and Logical Thinking to combine hard and soft skill testing. You can even choose individual questions from eSkill’s question bank to create your own test to fit your job description perfectly.
Because these skills test results can be built into the application process, you can create a skills profile for each candidate, showing you their strengths and weaknesses at a glance. Best of all, if a candidate is not a good fit for the current position, you can keep their results on file in case a job opens up that they might be better suited for — a quality that we call Job Fit.
Hiring the Person with the Best Job Fit Affects Budgets
Sometimes, the focus on recruitment in HR budget and planning analysis stops after a hire is made, but in reality, recruitment efforts continue long after the new hire is onboarded.
According to Forbes, turnover can cost companies more than 30% of an employee’s salary. By making sure that you attract the best candidates, you raise the chances of avoiding a bad hire that can severely impact your company’s bottom line.
Skills testing can play a significant role in enhancing employee retention. By assessing both hard and soft skills, testing can help ensure that new hires will have the skills they need to be successful, including non-technical skills like creativity and communication.
Skills testing also helps to eliminate unconscious bias, an essential part of the ever-increasing drive companies are making to improve equity and diversity in their workplaces. Skills tests help you judge employees based on quantified skills rather than any external factors. Data from skills tests make the process much more equitable. Workplaces with higher levels of diversity even tend to have better retention rates.
Interested to Learn How Skills Tests Can Fit into Your HR Budgeting and Planning Process?
Learn how eSkill’s Talent Assessment PlatformTM can help you to maximize your HR budget. Request a demo today.