Starting Again with your Recruiting Budget

Take a big step back and think about your recruiting budget. If you started from a blank sheet of paper and only one dollar, how would you use it? Would you keep pursuing the same recruiting strategies you use now or start from scratch? Would your job board spend be the same percentage it was in the past? Would you outsource more or less of the recruiting effort to an RPO? Would you reform your employee referral program? Would you invest more in your employment brand?

I asked a lot of tough questions, but don’t go into shock on me. Simply, I recommend that you pause for a moment. Think about the next months and years ahead as a tremendous opportunity to put your organization and your career on a new trajectory if you can consider big change over incremental change.

Make an Appointment with Change

I know that it’s hard to think of big change while flying through the day at full speed, but constant incremental changes may not get you where you want to go. Like many other industries, recruiting is experiencing fundamental change during a challenging business cycle. Social media has created new recruiting channels to connect with candidates and made it easy for them to connect with us on an unprecedented scale. Job boards once dominated the landscape, but other interactive recruiting avenues are squeezing them. There is a new sense of urgency around recruiting metrics, analytics and ROI. Let’s face facts; recruiting teams are probably lighter on staff than they have been in years. Also, there are more technologies, services, and business models in recruiting than ever before.

Are you missing paradigm shifts while you are so focused on getting through the day’s to-do list or the yellow sticky notes around your office? It’s a struggle to be strategic when things are moving quickly, but it’s crucial to find time for the long term vision. So just make an appointment on your calendar for yourself. I recommend you carve out an hour or two – look out the window, reflect on all your great experience, and think about how you have handled change in the past. Grab that blank sheet of paper and draw up your vision from scratch. Do it for fun. Do it to brainstorm. Ask your team to try it as well. You’ll probably be pleasantly surprised. You’ll probably smile a little more that day. It’s supposed to be a little fun isn’t it?

Taking the long term strategic view of your recruiting game plan is tough. As momentum in the market picks up, you will be glad you did it. The way I try to prepare myself for the next few years is to embrace a natural sense of curiosity and be ready for the one constant - change.

P.S. – This blog was written and then completely overhauled in the spirit of embracing change.

Neil Costa is the CEO of HireClix. HireClix is an interactive recruitment marketing agency helping recruiting teams leverage search engine optimization, pay-per-click recruiting, targeted interactive advertising, email marketing and social media to attract quality candidates.