What Is Cheap Recruitment Costing Your Business?

We are fresh back from the All-Energy 09 conference. What a difference a year makes in this industry!

One subject uppermost in every company’s mind at this year’s exhibition was the “cost” of recruitment. The current climate of course means that new entrants into the renewable energy recruitment market are popping up everywhere it seems. But is “cheap” good and what long term value are you building in your business – or even short term pain?

Here’s two real live examples we’ve seen in the last 2 days at All-Energy 09 where cheap recruitment can actually be damaging to your business:-

1. Company X - suffered the loss of no less than 3 senior managers in the space of a year. Result:- damage to credibility and reputation, missed opportunity and potentially revenue, wasted operational time. Cause:- Insufficient qualification of candidates, no background check on history, no behavioural testing against real life business challenges 
   
2. Company Y – 6 months on and still looking for a CTO using a multi-agency approach. Result:– damage to business credibility (not to mention future investor potential), misrepresentation in the marketplace as to company strategy, impaired ability to attract good talent on account of poor recruitment positioning. 
   

All this is easily avoided by investing time in giving full briefs about your business culture, vision and goals and working with a partner who takes the time to match and marry candidate motivations, aspirations, skills & knowledge – with everyone involved in the recruiting process. It’s not just about filling that seat! The quality of approach and qualification adopted by your recruiting partner is vital to the wellbeing of your business – the results can be the difference between failure and survival in today’s market, and the right partner can actually enhance your reputation in the marketplace – and bring you unexpected windfalls in the shape of direct approaches for future hires.

So what does cutting corners in recruitment quality, process and methodology cost your business?

It’s a sad fact that you can calculate the price of a failed of hire to 3 x salary and sometimes more. This could be down to lost opportunity, Directors time invested and damaged reputation.

So if someone is offering you a service at 12% in today’s market – you need to ask yourself what they’ve had to drop from their quality of service. Because if it’s a reference check they are dropping to save time in order to meet a volume “rack 'em, pack 'em an' stack 'em” approach you can bet your life that time will fall back on your desk sorting out the fall out from a failed hire. £1,000 extra spent today – could be a £20,000 return on investment in the next quarter because you are able to focus on the right things in your business.

Debby Lloyd
Managing Director, EcoSearch

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