The labour market is tight and at the same time employers are facing rising production costs due to inflation, lower consumer confidence and increasing labour costs. As costs rise, you need to be smart about your recruitment budget. Those vacancies still need to be filled, but preferably in an efficient and effective way. You want to get the most out of every euro, including when it comes to recruitment. With the help of recruitment marketing automation, you can! By using smart recruitment tooling, you can recruit more candidates with the same - or even less - budget. In this blog, we will show you how to get started.
Cost per hire especially important now
We are in turbulent economic times. Among other things, high inflation rates, low consumer confidence, a rising number of bankruptcies and smaller profit margins are causing a recession in the first two quarters of 2023. On the other hand, the war for talent is still going strong. Vacancies are still hard to fill, especially with many employers' recruitment budgets shrinking - due to all other rising costs.
This makes cost per candidate and cost per hire more important now than ever for recruiters and recruitment marketers. To be successful in your job, you not only have to be able to attract candidates, but also achieve this at an acceptable cost. You are therefore critical of how you use your recruitment budget and want to get the most out of it. Not throwing money into a black box, but being in control and having real-time insight into the effectiveness of every euro you spend. That is possible with recruitment marketing software.
Getting more from your recruitment budget starts with more efficient and effective candidate sourcing
With recruitment marketing software, you can outsource some of the work to technology, saving time and reducing the number of FTEs needed to still have consistent visibility as an employer and promote your jobs to the right audience at the right time. You can also use your recruitment budget more effectively by lowering the barrier to contact for candidates and adjust campaigns quickly and easily with real-time insights. So you will recruit candidates more efficiently and effectively using a single technological solution. Win-win!
Save time with recruitment marketing automation
Recruitment marketing automation helps you recruit more efficiently. By letting technology do the work, you save time for recruiters and recruitment marketers. And time is money, right?
Plan your employer branding campaigns in advance
With the current labour market shortages, employer branding is crucial for every employer to attract new employees. After all, you want to stand out from others. Show who you are and what you stand for, so that you trigger something with like-minded people.
Consistency is the key to success. You need to be and stay visible. Setting up employer branding campaigns with different content for different target groups takes time. Unless you use software that helps you do so. Brand activation tooling allows you to plan employer branding campaigns up to a year in advance, including content changes. That means setting up once and then you can't forget about it afterwards!
This way - without taking much time - you are consistently visible with your employer story. Future candidates get to know your organisation and become increasingly enthusiastic about a job with you. If they consider a transfer at some point, they will think of you!
Automatically promote vacancies
Besides telling your employer story, you also want to market your vacancies. If you always have to set up manual vacancy campaigns for each vacancy, it will take a lot of time. Especially if there are dozens or perhaps hundreds of vacancies per year!
Automatic promotion of vacancies does not sound like an unnecessary luxury. Good news, with job marketing technology you can automate this process. With a few clicks, you can promote your vacancies at the right time via the right channels to your target group. Instead of spending hours setting up campaigns, you now have your job campaigns online in no time. At Royal HaskoningDHV, this is less than 30 minutes' work thanks to automations. Just calculate how much time you will save.
Candidates approaching you
One recruitment channel that consumes a lot of recruiters' time is sourcing. Unfortunately, this does not always yield the best results. Candidates are approached so much that they often don't even respond to a message from a potential employer. It would save your recruitment team a lot of time if candidates contacted you themselves, for instance because they became enthusiastic in response to your employer branding content, work-at-home site or a specific vacancy.
To ensure that candidates come to you, it is important to make the contact threshold as low as possible. Therefore, do not just offer an application button - many candidates do not take the step to apply quickly - but let them ask questions or leave their basic details simply and quickly.
You can organise this with lead generation tooling. A well-known example of lead generation in recruitment is a Whatsapp pop-up on your work-at-home site. This allows candidates to easily ask questions or express their interest, without having to apply immediately with a CV. You can even set up your lead generation tool so that candidates automatically answer a few questions and schedule an online introduction. This way, introductions to candidates automatically arrive in your calendar, without you having to spend all your time doing so.
"Thanks to recruitment marketing software, we don't have to worry about the entire preliminary recruitment process. We don't have to sourced ourselves or use other recruitment channels to bring in candidates. We get responses for our vacancies in an automated way."
Sanne Schouten, HR Advisor at Childcare Mundo
Reduce cost per hire with recruitment marketing automation
You can also reduce your cost per hire by making every euro of your recruitment budget as useful as possible. By using recruitment marketing software you will have real-time insight into the performance of your campaigns and you can turn the optimisation knobs yourself. You will also be able to significantly increase the conversion rate on your work-at-home site and make the most of your media budget.
Insight is the basis for success
To run successful recruitment marketing campaigns, it is important to monitor performance and adjust where necessary. With recruitment marketing software, you can see at a glance how your campaigns are performing and you don't have to view results on many different platforms or transfer them into a spreadsheet.
You can see in real time what's happening with every euro you put in and make decisions based on that to ensure more success. And that means more candidates. For the same or maybe even less money!
"If you have to monitor and adjust your campaigns on every platform separately, it takes a lot of time and is very likely to slip through when you are busy with other things. With recruitment marketing automation, I always have insight and optimising campaigns is a snap. I'm sure that contributes to campaign results."
Esmée Maton, Employer Brand and Recruitment Marketer at Royal HaskoningDHV
Increase conversion
Many employers stand to gain by using their media budget more effectively. The conversion rate on a work-at-home site is only 1% on average. So only 1 in 100 people apply and you lose those other 99. Even though you have spent advertising budget on them and they are probably interested in you as an employer. They are just not ready to apply yet.
With lead generation tooling, you can substantially increase your conversion rate, because it offers a low-threshold action for the candidate. Starting a Whatsapp conversation is not nearly as exciting as applying straight away, which is why many more people do it. We regularly see the conversion on a work-for-hire site increase to as much as 5% to 10% by using lead generation tooling.
Calculate your cost per hire
A quick calculation shows that this can save you a lot of money, while speaking to more candidates. Win-win!
Calculation example: you now have an advertising budget of €1,000 per month. For this amount you get 1,000 visitors to your work-at-home site and 1% of them apply. So then you have 10 applicants per month and you spend €100 per applicant on advertising costs. With the use of lead generation, your conversion rate can easily increase to, say, 7%. That means you suddenly talk to 70 (potential) candidates per month. If you have an applicant-to-hire ratio of 1 to 7, you can fill 10 vacancies with those 70 responses. Instead of one and a half vacancies without lead generation tooling. Even if you cut your media budget to €750 a month now, you still get 750 visitors to your work-at-home site and 52 responses. A lot more than before, while spending less money on your campaigns!
Reducing cost per hire with recruitment marketing automation: a smart approach to shrinking recruitment budgets
With recruitment marketing automation you can reduce your cost per hire. Great when your recruitment budget is shrinking! You can build a strong employer brand, save time setting up vacancy campaigns and actively sourcing candidates, achieve better campaign results through real-time insight and speak to more candidates, without having to expand your team capacity or recruitment budget. In fact, you let the software do most of the work and get more results from every euro you spend on recruitment marketing.
For example, Dura Vermeer received more than 1,800 messages from potential candidates from the construction industry in 6 months. Care organisation QuaRijn was able to hire 300 new employees in one year. At Royal HaskoningDHV, they run up to 15 job campaigns simultaneously and 5 full funnel campaigns a year, with a team of just 2 recruitment marketers. All thanks to smart technology.Also working on your recruitment strategy and curious about the opportunities for budget-friendly filling of your vacancies, while lowering the cost per hire? Schedule a demo and we will go through it together! Or get started yourself and stay informed about all possibilities and best practices via our monthly Recruitment Stories.
