One of the biggest issues in HR & recruiting these days is budget.  How can recruiting organizations provide a business case to management to get more budget for recruiting campaigns & initiatives?

But while this is important, I urge you to take a different view to this problem.  Think not how you can get more budget but think about how you can better use the budget you have more effectively.  What does this mean?  It means:

• Reducing your usage of under-performing recruiting channels to free up money for new initiatives.
• Increasing usage of recruiting channels that perform well.
• Identifying new channels that can provide cost effective ROI.

When looking to understand where your ROI is coming from in your recruitment marketing campaigns, you need to begin setting up metrics & reporting within your recruitment process.

When doing this first look at your legacy systems.  Whether it’s your ATS, job distribution solution or Recruitment CRM, see what metrics you are & can collect today.

Second, understand what metrics you need to collect in order to make educated decisions on your job spend.  From tracking applicants, qualified candidates and hires (per recruiting source) to understanding how effective your job messaging is with recruitment marketing metrics (views, apply clicks, applicants).  Understand what you want to KNOW about your recruitment funnel and match that with the technology you are utilizing.

You’ve started to collect the metrics for your funnel, now is the time to start evaluating and making better use of the budget you have available.

Here are a few ways that companies are utilizing metrics to get more out of their recruiting budget:

Fire Job Boards:  One of the biggest advantages of recruiting metrics has been the ability to accurately see the performance of job boards & social networks you are using in terms of bringing in applicants and hires.  No longer do organizations need to post & pray or renew 1 year contracts without knowing how well a certain board is performing.

We’ve worked with several organizations that have been able to re-distribute budget from an under-performing job board into new recruiting channels and significantly increased their ROI.

Your messaging is broken:  Sometimes it’s not the channels you are using but the messaging that you are pushing out to them.  With recruitment marketing metrics, you will understand how well your messaging is at converting candidates that view your job ads into applicants.  Making certain changes to your job ads can have a great impact on overall conversion in your funnel and only costs the effort you put into it.

Utilizing Free Channels: Free channels such as Indeed, SimplyHired & social networks represent an opportunity to get ROI for the same recruiting budget.  Try out these free channels and understand the ROI you are getting from them.  We’ve spoken with companies that have been surprised with the ROI impact some of these channels have had in their recruiting.

It’s as important as ever to begin collecting metrics on your recruiting campaigns and understanding where your ROI is coming from.  This will help you get more out of your recruiting campaigns and best of all, will help you build those business cases for more budget with management.