More applicants, more CVs… more time recruiting

If you’re recruiting at the moment, you may have noticed something: there are a lot of people looking for work.

With redundancies almost 10% higher than they were last year, more candidates are entering the job market. And while having plenty of applicants might sound like good news when you have a vacancy to fill, it can create another problem entirely.

Someone has to go through all those applications.

For small and medium-sized businesses in particular, that ‘someone’ is often a business owner, manager or member of the HR team who already has a very full to-do list.

Imagine you advertise a vacancy and receive 100 applications.

Even if you spend just three minutes reviewing each CV, that’s five hours of your working week gone before you have spoken to a single candidate.
And recruitment rarely stops at reading CVs.

There are applications to acknowledge, candidates to assess against your criteria, telephone calls to make, interviews to arrange and unsuccessful applicants to contact.
Suddenly, recruiting one new employee has become quite a substantial project.

Of course, finding the right person is important. A good hire can make an enormous difference to your business. But is spending hours working your way through applications the best use of your time? More applicants don’t necessarily make recruitment easier.

More applicants don’t necessarily make recruitment easier

A larger candidate pool gives you more choice, but it doesn’t automatically make it easier to find the right person.
Quite often, it makes the initial stages more difficult.

You may have highly relevant candidates sitting alongside people who have applied speculatively, candidates who don’t meet your essential criteria and applicants who look suitable on paper but aren’t quite right when you speak to them.

The challenge is finding the people who are worth progressing – without losing hours, or potentially days, doing it.

And when recruitment isn’t your day job, it can be very easy for the process to slip down the priority list while you deal with customers, employees and everything else involved in running your business.

That can create another problem. Good candidates don’t tend to stay available forever.

What if somebody else did the time-consuming bit?

That’s where our Pure Human Resources Fixed Fee Recruitment Service can help.

Rather than you managing the whole recruitment process yourself, we take away much of the time-consuming work involved in attracting applicants, managing applications and identifying the candidates who best meet your requirements.

Instead of opening your inbox to dozens – or potentially hundreds – of CVs, you can concentrate your time and attention on the candidates who are genuinely worth considering.

You still make the important decision about who joins your business. We simply make the journey to that decision much easier.

It means less time spent trawling through CVs and more time spent running your business.

The true cost of DIY recruitment

It’s easy to think that recruiting yourself is the cheapest option because there isn’t an obvious recruitment fee attached.

But your time has a value too.

If you or one of your managers spends several hours writing an advert, posting it, reviewing applications, screening candidates and managing correspondence, there is a cost to the business – even if it doesn’t appear as a separate line on an invoice.

There’s also the opportunity cost.

What could you have been doing instead?

Meeting clients? Developing your team? Winning new business? Tackling the jobs that have been sitting on your list for weeks?

Outsourcing recruitment isn’t simply about finding candidates. It’s about giving valuable time back to your business.

Recruitment support without traditional agency fees

Our Fixed Fee Recruitment Service gives you professional recruitment support for an agreed fixed cost, rather than the traditional percentage-of-salary agency model.
And because we work closely with you to understand the vacancy and what you’re looking for, we can help you manage the process while keeping you firmly in control of the final decision.

So, if your next job advert attracts 20 applications, 100 applications or considerably more, you don’t have to spend your evenings working your way through a mountain of CVs.

We can do the sifting for you.

You concentrate on choosing the right person.
We’ll help you find them.

Recruiting?

If you have a vacancy coming up and would rather spend your time meeting the strongest candidates than reading every application yourself, talk to the Pure Human Resources team about our Fixed Fee Recruitment Service.
It could save you considerably more than recruitment costs.
It could save you your time.More applicants, more CVs… and a lot more time spent recruiting