6 min read

Reduce Talent Cost Without Losing Your Competitive Edge

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The “great resignation” continues to create a tight employment market, resulting in increased talent expenses for employers. Yet this isn’t necessarily a new development. In fact, talent and recruiting-related challenges have consistently topped most HR professionals’ lists of their biggest challenges in recent years. Consequently, many companies are examining ways to reduce talent cost while remaining competitive and attractive to top talent. 

Generally speaking, the talent-expense problem is rarely attributable to a company’s salary structure. Instead, in most cases, it’s about the processes and policies governing the ways in which the business recruits, hires, retains, and onboards its talent. Consider adopting these seven strategies to cut down on your biggest talent expenses without losing productivity or competitiveness. 

Implement ATS-agnostic Talent Intelligence (TI)

Recruiting accounts for over 15% of all HR-related expenses. Consequently, one efficient way to trim costs is to optimize your company’s recruiting process. In addition to directly lowered costs, a more efficient recruitment process increases the company’s ROI on talent-related expenditures. And one of the best ways to achieve that goal is through the implementation of Talent Intelligence (TI), an AI-powered solution that can help your business assess its workforce departments and teams, find strategic strengths and weaknesses, and locate the most qualified individuals for open positions. 

For example, Censia’s TI Platform maintains a proprietary database with data on hundreds of millions of professionals, covering not only education, experience, and work patterns but also intrinsic traits such as a candidate’s likely sense of loyalty and abilities to innovate and streamline work processes. The database then creates search models that quickly assess, quantify and rank all these factors to help your company identify the ideal candidates, including passive candidates as well as current employees. 

Censia and other ATS-agnostic TI platforms help save companies money in a number of ways. For example, these solutions can reduce the time spent by HR and recruitment teams on manual recruiting tasks by up to 90%. They can also reduce the time spent reviewing resumes from 25 hours per position to just one. As a result, your company enjoys a faster hiring process with a significantly reduced time to hire. In turn, productivity and morale increase. 

Promote from within to reduce talent cost

One of the easiest ways to trim your talent expenses is to promote from within the ranks of your current workforce. In fact, hiring from within costs an employer 18% less than external recruitment.

Additionally, your ready-made pool of highly trained and experienced talent can cut your time to a successful hire significantly. Internal mobility results in increased productivity, a better cultural fit, and less risk overall. Your “new” hire knows your company and has already proven to be well aligned with the company culture. By the same token, you already know that person’s skills and potential. 

Expand your vision with titles 

Job titles aren’t always exact matches and may not even be substantially equivalent from one organization to another. Restricting your applicant evaluation processes to those whose current job title matches the title of the position results in a limited pool of qualified candidates. 

Instead, consider taking a closer look at people holding positions that are just beneath the role you’re hiring for, whether the candidate is a current employee or an external applicant. Focus more tightly on skills, relevant functional experience, and trainability. Otherwise qualified candidates can be trained into a new role. 

Invest in upskilling and reskilling

Hiring “experts” for important roles seems like a good investment for a company, and in some cases, it may be. However, it’s also costly, especially compared to upskilling and reskilling employees. By 2022, over 50% of employees will require some form of upskilling in order for your company to stay competitive and meet evolving industry and business challenges. Start now. Invest in training your existing top talent to stay current and competitive will help reduce future recruitment and training costs. 

Make the right hires

The cost of hiring the wrong person can be substantial—according to one 2016 CareerBuilder study, the average cost of a bad hire is between $7,000 and $10,000 for entry-level positions. What’s more, by some estimates, that cost can be $40,000 or more for managerial positions. 

These are unnecessary costs that are often shouldered by companies trying to fill key gaps in their workforce. In that same CareerBuilder study, 75% of employers admitted that they hired the wrong person for some position in the past. A bad hire also results in productivity losses, as a bad hire causes significant disruption in the company’s workflow, perhaps due to damaged morale. 

Dress up your business’s branding

Does your company walk its talk? Are its values aligned closely with its policies and actions? Do your branding elements, logo, mission statement, social media and other marketing elements all communicate accurately who you are? 

If not, it’s time to give your branding a makeover. The top candidates want to work for a company that reflects well on them and aligns with their values. To attract the best candidates make sure that the company is sending out the right messaging. That is, the message that communicates the company’s authentic values and goals. 

Attracting the right candidates from the beginning also means that your employee engagement and loyalty rates grow and stay strong. Keeping your top talent happy and engaged means a lower turnover rate and less churn costs. 

Upgrade and update your job descriptions

By the same token, when you ensure each of your job descriptions accurately reflects the reality of the position in question, you attract the right candidates—those who are appropriately skilled, experienced, and interested in doing that job. This means you’ll experience less attrition, particularly in the beginning when loss of a new hire translates into higher expenses and lost productivity. 

The goal here is to achieve accuracy, while also showing off your company in its best possible light. Make sure each description is well-crafted, evocative, and dynamically worded. 

Stay competitive with efficient recruitment

In a competitive market, it’s more crucial than ever for employers to remain deeply attractive. That includes budgetary allocations where they can do the most good and streamlining recruitment while keeping tightly focused on finding the right fit for each open position.

Further Reading

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