How Cost Per Hire Is Killing Business – And It’s Not What You Think

How Cost Per Hire Is Killing Business – And It’s Not What You Think

Why is it that we obsess about metrics like cost per hire when the cost of not filling a job can literally kill an organization’s bottom line?


The Real Cost Per Hire

I was in a meeting with the CEO, CMO, Director of Recruiting, and key staffers at a Fortune 500 company. The discussion was on candidate flow and the difficulty they were having filling revenue-producing positions. As the company’s massive investment in equipment, bricks and mortar was lying idle, customers were passing them by.  

HR’s response to the talent shortage? They wouldn’t do anything to the recruiting strategy that would increase the company’s current $700 cost per hire by $50. 

Meanwhile, the CEO pointed out the cost of not filling a position, one position, was roughly $19,000 per month in lost revenue. When I heard there were about 1,000 open positions at the company, my jaw dropped.

HR was worried about saving $50 per hire while the opportunity cost per hire was $19,000 per month. The business was losing hundreds of millions in revenue because it wasn’t making hires.  But… HR was keeping that cost per hire number under $700.  So, save tens of dollars and not make millions.

Empty Seats Are Costing You

If your recruiting efforts aren’t keeping pace with your organization’s workforce needs, it may be time to gain a better understanding of what the cost of not making a hire really is. What is that empty seat costing you? What’s that empty mechanic bay costing you? That unfilled nursing slot? The missing restaurant manager? Or that empty hairstylist chair?

In conclusion, if you are in talent acquisition or HR, knowing the cost of not making a hire can make you a rock star to your CEO. When you consider the actual financial impact and lost opportunity, you may find a lot more budget and support for recruiting by framing the problem around the cost of not filling positions. The fact is, unfilled jobs are throttling the growth of most companies, and that’s probably the case at your company, too. 

CEOs and CFOs get it.

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If you are tired of lost hiring opportunities, let’s connect. I’d like to understand the issues your company is facing and how PivotCX can help. Let’s talk about your recruiting. 

3 Ways to Accelerate Recruiting

3 Ways to Accelerate Recruiting

 

 

 

 Do you require a full 10+ step job application before you engage with a candidate? If so, you may be missing many of the best candidates. Why?

No one wants to sign a prenuptial on the first date.

Here’s another way to look at it:

Would your sales department require a full credit application before you talk to a potential buyer?No, of course they wouldn’t. They would first present the product they’re selling and sell its benefits. 

Why is it that most companies require such long job applications first?

20 Years of Bad Habits

Companies are still using grossly long job applications because we’ve gotten used to a long-term employer’s market. We got used to posting a job and getting 100 or more applications. Inundated with such a large applicant pool, we biased our hiring processes to screen out everyone who wasn’t an exact match.  

Better Recruiting Habits

The recruiting landscape has changed drastically in the past years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in October 2021 there were only 0.7 job seekers per job opening. Now that there’s less than one available job seeker per open job, maybe it’s time to rethink how we engage with job seekers. Here are 3 things our most successful customers do:

1. Apply Faster

The fastest applications only need 3 fields: a name, a phone number, and an email address. It’s better to collect the bare minimum contact information to get the candidate talking as soon as possible with a recruiter rather than put them off with long form applications which should be reserved until after an actual job offer.

2. Engage Faster

Our most successful employers are responding to job seeker interest in less than 2-4 hours. A year ago, you could wait 2-4 days and still find quality candidates. If you want to get the best people, go even faster and respond in minutes.

3. Talk to Job Seekers

Have a human-to-human conversation with applicants as quickly as possible. If you are having people fill out long applications online and are only talking to the candidates you are interested in, your competition is eating your lunch. Most job seekers have basic questions they need answered to determine if they want to apply. Sometimes it is about benefits, sometimes it is about compensation, sometimes it is about requirements — most often it’s about something you don’t expect — and it takes a person to answer the question.

At PivotCX our candidate advocate team talks to every job seeker within minutes of every inquiry. Our team is answering job seeker questions, getting a complete profile and making sure there’s a good fit, and then referring candidates to our client companies who are then engaging with the applicants to complete the hiring process. 

Think Different

Times have changed. Jobs used to be scarce. Now applicants are. Regardless of how we got here, the new reality is there is less than one job seeker available for each open job in the US. 

It’s time to start treating job seekers like they are scarce — because they are.

Find out: PivotCX helps your company respond with a live person in seconds to candidate inquiries. 

    Want to learn more about how PivotCX can improve your applicant flow? Request a demo.

    Webinar: Find Your Missing Candidate Flow

    Webinar: Find Your Missing Candidate Flow

    Candidates are getting more expensive and job boards are raising their prices. With fresh, new traffic becoming harder to get, employers can learn to tap into their forgotten candidate pool of past applicants. Find your missing candidate flow and join us on a webinar as we discuss how to mine more qualified people you can hire today from your past applicants.

    Dec 2nd at 2:00pm EST / 11:00am PST
    (Duration: 30min)

    Presenters:

    Mike Seidle, CTO & Cofounder, PivotCX David Anderson, CEO & Founder, Field of Talent

    Agenda:
    Learn how you can quickly organize your past candidates from your ATS, CRM or even from a spreadsheet.
    – Find out how to get your message in front of candidates and get candidates to respond within minutes.
    – How to lower recruitment costsby remarketing you candidate pool.
    – Discover how to equip your recruiters so they can have actual person-to-person conversations with as many as 250 candidates per day.
    – Increase candidate flow.

    Webinar: Think Like a Sales Org and Accelerate Your Recruiting Pipeline

    Webinar: Think Like a Sales Org and Accelerate Your Recruiting Pipeline

    Learn how to accelerate your recruiting pipeline. Recruiters can learn an important lesson from their sales counterparts: Speed is Key. The sooner a recruiter reaches out to a candidate, the more likely that candidate will progress through the recruiting funnel. With more engaged candidates, you are likely to make a hire faster. On the other hand, the longer you wait to engage a candidate, the less they remember applying to your job. As your job become less memorable, a candidate’s chances of losing interest in what you have to offer as an employer are likely to increase.  

    Presenter Joe Matar of Brazen joins Mike Seidle, CTO and Cofounder of PivotCX, and Brandon Prideaux, Division Director of Talent Acquisition at HCA Healthcare, to talk about how they are using quicker engagement to accelerate their recruiting pipeline. 

     

    PivotCX Campaigns

    PivotCX Campaigns

    At PivotCX, we are constantly striving to provide valuable product features. Our new PivotCX Campaigns feature offers our clients the ability to reach candidates with timely text messages. 

    PivotCX Campaigns can vary from a single message blast to a series of timed messages to engage candidates when ready to speak with our candidate advocates or directly with a recruiter from your company. 

    With a tight job market, it is imperative to learn how to reach job seekers quickly. However, speed of contact is not enough. To differentiate you from the many other employment options applicants have right now, PivotCX offers the best of both worlds: speed and human-to-human connection in recruiting. 

    How to Reach Job Seekers with 3 Recruiting Strategies

    How to Reach Job Seekers with 3 Recruiting Strategies

     Do you want to know what is more challenging than finding job seekers these days? Learning how to reach job seekers. It can be a game of cat-and-mouse to have meaningful conversations with them and keep them engaged long enough to know whether they have the qualifications needed to make a great hire!

    More than ever, it is essential to reach candidates as soon as possible and to be prepared when they are ready to convert. On the other hand, some candidates need several impressions before they engage with your content.

    We’ll cover three strategies to stay connected to your job candidates with ease. We happen to like using the new  PivotCX Campaigns feature, but the strategies apply to recruiting in general.

     

    1. Inform Past Applicants of a New Job Opening or a Re-opening

    In the current employment market, candidates are getting more expensive, and job boards are raising their prices. With fresh, new traffic becoming harder to get, getting creative with how to reach job seekers can be a bloodline. 

    One often-forgotten source of candidates is your past applicant pool. Some of the benefits of reaching these job seekers are that they are already familiar with your company and you don’t have to pay extra to get their contact information.

    It’s likely that you already have a gauge on the people you would like to contact from your past applicant pool. Perhaps, there were two or three excellent candidates, but you could only hire one. The perfect time to get a hold of them is when a new, similar role opens. Additionally, there’s only one way to know whether these applicants are still in the market for a new job or might now be ready to make a move. 

    Employers can use PivotCX Campaigns to tap into their forgotten candidate pool of past applicants and get more bang for their buck by remarketing to past candidates.

    2. Organize and Tap into your Talent Community

    Knowing who is in your talent community or past applicant list helps you understand and discover what works best to attract their attention to your job posts and keep them engaged for as long as possible.

    You can run A/B tests by segmenting your candidates, such as dividing half your list and changing messages or altering the delivery cadence. This allows you to gain insights into how you reach out to job applicants; for example, you can find the length and type of message that works best for your candidates.

    You can also be more granular in your approach to diverse candidates depending on their location, the position they applied for, how long ago they applied to the job, medium, source, etc.

    Whether from an ATC, CRM, or even from a spreadsheet, PivotCX Campaigns allows you to attach a series of messages to any candidate list to make reaching out to applicants easier. 

     

    3. Remind Candidates about their Recent Job Application

     Life gets busy, especially when trying to find a new job. Candidates want to optimize their chances to make it past the pile of resumes on any recruiter’s desk by applying to as many jobs as they can.

    The downside is that they’ve lost track of which employers they applied to or the job details after a couple of days. Thus, it is essential to be fast and persistent when reaching out to job applicants. 

    This is why PivotCX Campaigns aim to nudge job applicants who might have fallen off the application track. With time delays between automated messages that can be customized down to the minute, it’s easy to set the right cadence to reach candidates when they are more likely to respond to your message. 

    Keep it human by reaching out to job seekers. Letting them know that you’ve seen their application and are interested can give you a leg up over employers that never bother to reach out to applicants or take three months to even get in touch with them.

     Figuring out how to reach candidates takes time, but these strategies can help you leverage what you already know about job seekers and make it easier to find the perfect fit for your job opening.