What’s the percentage of hires to resumes in your company in a given year? I bet you’d be surprised to hear that it’s on average only about five percent. So that means that 95% of the resumes you receive are not part of your companies recruitment strategy. Many great hires could not be made because candidates turned down your offers due to compensation, job location, lack of interest in your company, improper fit, etc. Could someone else be making these hires.

Do you realize the financial investment that was made in attracting, receiving and processing those resumes? For discussion purposes let’s put a conservative figure here and say $200 per resume received. So if your company receives 10,000 resumes, your potential investment loss is $1,900,000. And le’ts face it this is a very conservative since most companies receive many more resumes and spend a lot more than this on attraction and processing.

So what could you do to re-coup some of that investment and reduce the financial impact to your company's profit line? Not only could your re-coup some of the investment but how about making your company stronger and better prepared to face your competitors.

How about developing your recruitment strategy around the fact that your company is already in partnership with suppliers, partners and co-petitors that could leverage your resumes for potential hires. If you strike a deal with other recruitment functions you could be leveraging their resumes for additional hires in your company. This way your ensuring your partners are thriving and keeping their costs down while taking away potential hires from your key competitors. This approach is similar to the Japanese keirabatsu business model.

To successfully launch such an initiative you have to set up your entire recruitment operations leveraging permission based recruitment so that candidates can self elect to participate in the program. They could also choose from a list of potential companies that they would share their resumes with.

For a program like this to work, human resources and the recruitment function have to work hand in hand with the business development function to ensure they are always in synchronization with the companies strategic aims. It’s a completely new skill set for recruiters to have, but one that will allow the function to go way beyond just being a resume warehouse.