£69M lost to poor recruitment decisions every year - It's Time for Sme's to Embrace Online Recruitment Technologies
20th Nov 2008
Paul Burgess, Managing Director of eploy®, responds to the recently published research by jobsite.co.uk*, which revealed that the UK's small and medium businesses are wasting an estimated £69m a year on poor recruitment decisions.
This research highlights the importance for more SME's to start investing in recruitment systems and applicant tracking software. These technologies will help them make informed choices during the selection process, which will ultimately save time and money. By adopting an online recruitment system which is able to fully integrate with their current website, SME's will be able to easily broaden their candidate searches through job boards which are now used by an estimated 80% of jobseekers this research states.
Broadly speaking, SME's have viewed recruitment software as an unnecessary or a costly expense - but this is a big misconception. According to this research, SME's invest £300m annually on recruiting 250,000 employees, and more than a fifth of these appointments have to be made twice within a year - so can these businesses afford to be without recruitment software?
Traditional recruitment methods have often led to quite a high cost per hire, with modern job boards often producing an overwhelming response, which can be difficult for SMEs to manage. Utilising job boards to reach a larger population and sending responses to your applicant tracking software however, is a more cost-effective recruitment solution. The high number of enquiries, which are generally received via the web, can be easily administered as the system will quickly sift through CV's, and automatically identify and match the skills required. This allows the recruiter to focus on the "best match" candidates first, and importantly helps him/her broaden their candidate search in the first instance, and then find, engage and recruit the right calibre of staff as efficiently as possible, without wasting time looking through unsuitable CVs. Quality candidates that didn't make it are also there for the future, often eliminating the need to re-advertise positions.
More fundamentally, the issue of 'big' costs or fixed long term contracts that may have been traditionally associated with recruitment software, no longer applies. eploy®'s recruiting software, for example, is used by many SMEs because it has been designed to provide access via a standard internet web browser, as opposed to installing traditional software which can have large upfront costs and can be difficult and expensive to access remotely. Ultimately this leads to a much more efficient, flexible and accessible system with significantly reduced costs.
Many of our SME clients have cited that the low setup cost, monthly charge, no long term contract and the flexible nature of the eploy® system made the decision a low risk and straightforward service to implement.
To take a look at the latest advances in recruitment technology please contact us for a free online trial.
*Research conducted by www.jobsite.co.uk - October 2008