Three ways to reduce external recruitment costs

Every recruiter knows that attracting and hiring the right talent for your organization is extremely important. However, it doesn't always come cheaply and may require some extra help. In fact, external recruitment costs account for almost 30% of most HR teams’ budgets.

But it doesn’t have to be as laborious as you might think. With some helpful tips, you could cut external costs, streamline your recruitment and strengthen your employer brand.

What are external recruiting costs?

So, which of your costs actually count as external recruitment? Well, it covers anything within your budget that doesn’t come under internal costs. For example:

• Job boards: It’s normal to want to get your job roles out on as many job boards as you can—while this could be a good way to get eyes on your roles, it could eat up a chunk of your budget.
• External agencies: You might feel you need a little extra help to move your recruitment along. Some hiring managers choose to invest in external agencies to grow their talent pools.
• Third-party tools: It’s unlikely that you’ll find just one tool that’ll take you through your recruitment process from start to finish, not perfectly anyway. You’re likely to need a few different systems to make the most of your hiring process.

How do you reduce external recruiting costs?

Luckily, there are a few ways to cut some of these costs down without losing any of the quality or efficiency of your recruitment process—in fact, these are likely to make your process even more efficient. 

Leverage your employer brand ✨

Job boards can help increase the visibility of your open roles, but with a strong employer brand and social media presence, you might be able to do the bulk of this yourself.

One of the most important things you can do for your employer brand is to have a user-friendly and striking career site. Use it to really showcase your company culture and let your applicants get an idea of what it’s really like to work with you.

Social media is one of the most powerful tools you should be using to attract your candidates. 79% of job seekers check you on social media before they apply to a role, so leverage it to generate reach and drive traffic to your career site. Make sure you have a solid strategy and be as consistent as possible. We have more tips on improving your employer brand you can check out here.

It’s also key to invest in an ATS that can help you automate most of these processes. An ATS with a built-in career site is a great way to cut down costs and make sure everything is seamlessly integrated. Most ATSs will also integrate with a number of job boards as well as social media platforms to help you make the most of your hiring strategy.

Streamline your process and nurture your talent pool 🏊

Just because a particular candidate isn’t right for an open role you have right now, it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be perfect for something you have an opening in the future. Additionally, from a candidate perspective, there might not be anything open that’s interesting to them, but if they love your company culture, they may want to be kept updated on upcoming roles.

This is why building your talent pool and nurturing it at the same time is so important. Make sure your career site has a way for candidates to engage and subscribe to receive updates on all your future opportunities. You’ll reach the point where you already have an amazing pool of talent to pick from, whilst greatly reducing your time to hire and reliance on external agencies.

Another way to ensure a steady stream of new talent is to set up a referral system internally, which could also be incentivized. You could get a bulk of new candidates by encouraging current employees to refer someone they already know for an open role, once again saving time and cost.

Automating your tasks can be another useful way of improving efficiency and reducing reliance on external agencies. Some recruitment systems allow you to automate your hiring process based on triggers. This can save a huge amount of time and get rid of a lot of repetitive tasks, giving you time to focus on more strategic tasks such as sourcing and evaluating candidates.

Of course, if you’re hiring in large quantities, you may need extra help from a third party. If this is the case, make sure your ATS has external recruiter functionalities, so you can keep everything in one place and keep the process consistent.

Integrations are key 🗝️

As mentioned before, it’s very unlikely you’re going to find just the one system, which will do all of the above and more, and smoothly. However, we’ve also stressed the importance of keeping everything in one place to create a seamless process and eliminate any confusion. 

The best way to do this is to make sure your recruitment software has a vast range of integrations to help take you through the very beginning of the hiring process, right through to onboarding.

Most of the time, if your ATS has a big marketplace of integrations, you’re also likely to receive a variety of discounts depending on the software you decide to go for, which can help bring down those external recruitment costs by a sizeable chunk.

Overall, while it’s unlikely you’ll be able to get your external recruitment costs down to zero (and it’s probably not smart to do so), there are still a lot of things you can do to reduce them. 75% of Teamtailor users have seen a decrease in their external recruitment costs.

Let us show you how recruitment software can help you cut your external costs.