There is one thing no company can afford—a lousy hire.
It does not have to be that way.For most companies, inadequate recruitment through unsound practices is thought to be an unfortunate fact of life.
Consider the steps needed to fill an office vacancy. Often the hiring process goes like this:
- Identify a need for talent
- Create a job requisition
- Post to Craigslist, Indeed or Monster
- Prepare a spreadsheet of incoming resumes
- Perform cursory reviews of resumes
- Schedule interviews
- Get frustrated
- Just pick a person
- Hire them
Sound familiar?
Frequently, veteran business recruiters shorten this list by calling temp-to-perm agencies, taking the first person they send. Both methods are inadequate and time wasters, but bad habits are hard to break! So the revolving door continues.
The price of a lousy hire can build up quickly. Costs include time and recruiting responsibilities, salaries and training. Then there are separation costs, once a new hire turns out not to be the perfect fit.
However, there is excellent news! New tools are arriving daily, which take the clutter out of the hiring process. Taleo, Ovation, Jobvite, Smartrecruiters and others, are proving to be the most popular services, with features that make hiring managers sigh with relief.
The newest recruitment tools use Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud-based models delivering enterprise-level recruiting processes. The result is dramatically reduced costs. Based in the fast-rising technology of cloud computing, SaaS needs no infrastructure, keeping prices competitive.
As the fight for superior talent escalates, companies are increasingly using social networks to attract candidates. It is in this area of social media where companies are finding success. Paid job boards, while still effective, are beginning to take a backseat to the power of the social networks.
- Innovative SaaS tools focus on social media outlets to provide job posting management, easy access, detailed analytics and tracking. These methods commonly integrate with users’ email and calendars, completing a comprehensive hiring environment.
- With SaaS, asking contacts for candidate referrals is a snap. With integrated apps an executive or hiring manager can scan a contact list and pick and choose the person in their network for referrals. Hires through recommendations often reduce overall time-to-hire, often providing a perfect fit within the company’s culture.
- Another advantage to SaaS hiring tools is eliminating expensive temp-to-perm staffing companies or placement agencies. The services these companies provide are identical to SaaS, but at a substantially higher cost. With Customize the program for a particular business or activity, and SaaS tools can be billed at rates far less than the customary 30-100 percent mark-up of placement agencies.
Companies that fell into the black hole of staffing and placement firms can save massive amounts of money, often finding the same—or better—results. Staffing companies regularly justify their rates with a ‘try before you buy’ sales tactic, giving a grace period to see if a person fits your needs prior to a formal hire. With SaaS, and an internal 90-day probationary period, your office will get exactly the same results.
Senior recruiters, the “old dogs” resistant to innovation, will argue that placement firms do a better job of vetting candidates, by providing background and reference checks. SaaS tools perform these tasks automatically and efficiently, again saving time, headaches and money.
Cloud-based enterprise tools are the next logical step in the evolution of business. Recognizing the benefits—in cost and time—of SaaS is one of the hard lessons a business can learn in response to lean economic times. But the biggest takeaway for business is this; grasping the power of ready-to-use software, cloud computing and social networks will help you run a lean, efficient process-oriented operation, no matter what size business you have.
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