The labor market tightness continues and at the same time employers are facing rising production costs due to inflation, lower consumer confidence and rising labor costs. As costs rise, you have to be smart about your recruitment budget. Those vacancies still need to be filled, but preferably in an efficient and effective way. You want to get the most out of every euro, including in the area of recruitment. With the help of recruitment marketing automation you can! By using smart recruitment tooling, you can recruit more candidates with the same - or even less - budget. In this blog we show you how you can get started.
Cost per hire now extra important
We are in economically troubled times. Among other things, high inflation rates, low consumer confidence, a rising number of bankruptcies and smaller profit margins are driving recession in the first two quarters of 2023. On the other hand, the war for talent is still in full swing. Vacancies are still hard to fill, especially with many employers - due to all other rising costs - shrinking recruitment budgets.
That makes cost per candidate and cost per hire for recruiters and recruitment marketers more important now than ever. To be successful in your job, you not only have to be able to attract candidates, but also achieve this at an acceptable cost. You are therefore critical of how you use your recruitment budget and want to get the most out of it. No throwing money into a black box, but being in control and having real-time insight into the effectiveness of every euro you spend. That is possible with recruitment marketing software.
Getting more out of your recruitment budget starts with more efficient and effective candidate sourcing
With recruitment marketing software, you can outsource some of the work to technology, saving time and requiring fewer FTEs to still be consistently visible as an employer and promote your jobs to the right audience at the right time. In addition, you can use your recruitment budget more effectively by lowering the barrier to contact for candidates and make quick and easy adjustments to campaigns with real-time insights. You will therefore recruit candidates more efficiently and effectively using a single technological solution. Win-win!
Save time with recruitment marketing automation
Recruitment marketing automation helps you recruit more efficiently. By letting technology do the work, you save time for recruiters and recruitment marketers. And time is money, right?
Planning employer branding campaigns ahead
With the current labor market shortages, employer branding is critical for any employer to attract new employees. After all, you want to stand out from others. Show who you are and what you stand for, so that in doing so you trigger something with like-minded people.
In doing so, consistency is the key to success. You need to be visible and stay visible. Setting up employer branding campaigns with different content for various audiences takes time. Unless you deploy software that helps you do this. With brand activation tooling, you can plan employer branding campaigns up to a year in advance, including content changes. That means setting up once and then you can't forget about it after that!
This way - without taking much time - you are consistently visible with your employer story. Prospective candidates get to know your organization and become increasingly enthusiastic about a job with you. If they consider a transfer at some point, they will think of you!
Automatic promotion vacancies
In addition to telling your employer story, of course you also want to market your jobs. If you have to set up manual job posting campaigns for each job posting, it will take a lot of time. Especially if there are dozens or perhaps hundreds of vacancies per year!
Automatic job promotion, then, does not sound like an unnecessary luxury. Good news, with job marketing technology you can automate this process. With a few clicks you can promote your jobs at the right time through the right channels to your target audience. Instead of spending hours setting up campaigns, you now have your job campaigns online in no time. At Royal HaskoningDHV, this is less than 30 minutes' work thanks to automations. Just calculate how much time you will save.
Candidates who approach you
One recruitment channel that involves a lot of recruiters' time is sourcing. Unfortunately, this does not always yield the best results. Candidates are approached so much that they often don't even respond to a message from a potential employer. It would save your recruitment team a lot of time if candidates contact you themselves, for example because they have become enthusiastic in response to your employer branding content, work-at-home site or a specific vacancy.
To ensure that candidates come to you, it is important to make the barrier to contact as low as possible. Therefore, don't just offer an application button - many candidates don't take the step to apply quickly - but let them simply and quickly ask questions or leave their basic details.
You can organize this with lead generation tooling. A well-known example of lead generation in recruitment is a Whatsapp pop-up on your work-at-home site. With this, candidates can easily ask questions or express their interest, without having to apply immediately with a resume. You can even set up your lead generation tool to automatically have candidates answer a few questions and schedule an online introduction. That way, introductions to candidates automatically arrive in your calendar, without you having to spend the entire time doing so.
"Thanks to recruitment marketing software, we don't have to worry about the entire preliminary process in recruitment. We don't have to sourced ourselves or use other recruitment channels to bring in candidates. We get responses for our vacancies in an automated way."
Sanne Schouten, HR consultant at Childcare Mundo
Lower cost per hire with recruitment marketing automation
You can also reduce your cost per hire by making every euro of your recruitment budget as useful as possible. By using recruitment marketing software you have real-time insight into the performance of your campaigns and you can turn the optimization knobs yourself. You can also significantly increase the conversion rate on your work-at-home site and make the most of your media budget.
Insight is the basis for success
To run successful recruitment marketing campaigns, it is important to monitor performance and make adjustments as needed. With recruitment marketing software, you can see at a glance how your campaigns are doing and you don't have to look at results on many different platforms or transfer them into a spreadsheet.
You see in real time what is happening with every euro you put in and can make decisions based on that that ensure more success. And that means more candidates. For the same or maybe even less money!
"If you have to monitor and adjust your campaigns separately on each platform, that takes an awful lot of time and very likely slips in when you're busy with other things. With recruitment marketing automation I always have insight and optimizing campaigns is a snap. I'm sure that contributes to campaign results."
Esmée Maton, Employer Brand and Recruitment Marketer at Royal HaskoningDHV
Increase conversion
For many employers, there are gains to be made by using the media budget more effectively. On average, the conversion rate on a work-for-hire site is only 1%. So only 1 out of 100 people applies and the other 99 are lost. While you have spent advertising budget on them and they are probably interested in you as an employer. They're just not ready to apply yet.
With lead generation tooling, you can increase your conversion rate substantially because you are offering a low-threshold action for the candidate. Starting a Whatsapp conversation is not nearly as exciting as immediately applying for a job, which is why many more people do this. We regularly see that the conversion on a work-at-home site increases to 5% to 10% by using lead generation tooling.
Calculating your cost per hire
A quick calculation shows that this can save you a lot of money while speaking to more candidates. Win-win!
Calculation example: you now have an advertising budget of €1,000 per month. For this amount you get 1,000 visitors to your job site and 1% of them apply. So you have 10 applicants per month and you spend €100 per applicant on advertising costs. With the use of lead generation, your conversion rate can easily increase to, say, 7%. That means you suddenly talk to 70 (potential) candidates per month. If you have an applicant to hire ratio of 1 to 7, you can fill 10 vacancies with those 70 responses. Instead of one and a half vacancies without lead generation tooling. Even if you cut your media budget now to €750 per month, you still get 750 visitors to your work-at-home site and 52 responses. A lot more than before, while spending less money on your campaigns!
Reduce cost per hire with recruitment marketing automation: a smart approach to shrinking recruitment budgets
With recruitment marketing automation, you can lower your cost per hire. Great when your recruitment budget is shrinking! You can build a strong employer brand, save time on setting up job campaigns and actively sourcing candidates, achieve better campaign results through real-time insight and speak to more candidates, without having to expand your team capacity or recruitment budget. In fact, you let the software do most of the work and you get more results from every dollar you spend on recruitment marketing.
In 6 months, for example, Dura Vermeer received more than 1,800 messages from potential candidates from the construction industry. Healthcare organization QuaRijn was able to hire 300 new employees in one year. At Royal HaskoningDHV they run up to 15 job campaigns simultaneously and 5 full funnel campaigns per year, with a team of only 2 recruitment marketers. All thanks to smart technology.Also working on your recruitment strategy and wondering where the opportunities lie for budget-friendly filling your vacancies, while lowering the cost per hire? Schedule a demo and we'll take you through it together! Or get started yourself and stay informed about all possibilities and best practices through our monthly Recruitment Stories.
