When making any decision in life, you need to process and interplay a variety of factors to determine between a variety of choices you have at your disposal.  When sifting through these choices you’ll see differences in money, production and overall enjoyment that a certain decision will bring.  But the key deciding factor is most always time.  Do you have enough time to do this choice or better yet is it worth your time to do (with the other choices that are available to you?)

This question is fundamental to making a good decision on pretty much anything.  Not only does the actual monetary cost of an initiative need to come into play but the time it takes to implement a decision and opportunity cost associated with it is more important.

In my life, time available has factored into many of my decisions.  For my personal finances, I’ve decided to put some of my money in mutual funds instead of trading individual stocks because I don’t want to put the Time into staying in touch with the markets so I can focus on other things (trading off time spent for a probably a little less return.)  For reading news and blog articles, I use Google Reader to make it easy to scan and identify articles that I want to read, saving me time from having to check every one of my favorites for new content.

I encourage you to take a look at your recruitment marketing today.  What tasks just aren’t worth your time?  Can you automate them or get rid of them altogether?  Try to determine how much your time is worth for tasks like job ad distribution, resume sourcing, social recruiting, resume searching and a variety of other tasks you do on a daily basis and factor that into your overall budget.  Then develop a recruiting strategy that focuses your time on the most crucial tasks while automating the less crucial / repetitive ones.

The key to making good decisions is to determine what’s worth your time and what isn’t.  Once you figure that out, the rest should be easy.

Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Blog.