With a lot of recruitment being suspended or reversed there is inevitably going to be pressure on organisations to save money in the area of talent acquisition. This unfortunately may come at the expense of staff redundancies, but could come through savings from external suppliers and service providers.
External providers should look to offer as much value as possible, to help minimize the financial impact on organisations , which in turn, might help with staff retention levels. ‘Value’ could be provided through free services or alterations to pricing models, an increased focus on over-delivery or adapting offerings to help meet the needs of specific organisations.
As a service provider we are currently reviewing our own offerings to try and introduce greater flexibility into our provision. With such uncertainty around much recruitment activity, we have put together an offering that allows employers to turn services ‘on and off’, as and when required. We feel this will go some way to help organisations manage costs whilst delivering the support and flexibility they require at this time.
There are of course organisations that are continuing to recruit in numbers, particularly in those sectors where roles are critical. In these situations the focus is likely to be quite different. The primary concern may not be around cost savings directly, but filling vacancies quickly whilst ensuring costs do not spiral. Within the Health & Social Care Sectors for example, we have seen companies looking to over-staff to ensure they can maintain a continuation of service. However, they operate within a very tight financial framework so must ensure that they keep any expenditure that is not directly associated with the delivery of front line services, to an absolute minimum. For a number of these types of organisations, we have been able to provide multiple placement hires for just one flat fee. If we can find 10 great Support Workers for a Care Agency, at a cost per hire of below £100, then this has to be good for both parties!
The increasing volumes of recruitment activity in some sectors, has meant some internal teams struggle to manage all aspects of the process. This might be in the marketing of roles, candidate search, screening, interviewing, reference checking, and making offers or chasing acceptance letters. By customising our offering, we have been able to offer support at various points in this process. Recently, we have been asked for support around additional candidate contact to ensure applicants do not drop out of the funnel before the process has been completed. In other instances we have been able to support the introduction of video interviewing, and we see this as a really positive step. This has helped speed up the time to hire, and is likely to become the norm with many businesses post lockdown. For RGNs and other hard to fill roles, the approach and support we have offered has again been quite different. For these types of vacancies our activity has been much more focused around search activity.
It is difficult to know yet whether there will be any long term changes to the process of recruitment, but what is clear is that we are all having to think differently. We are having to think laterally & creatively, we’re being forced to operate in a more agile way and we are having to ensure that what we deliver has significant and measurable value. By doing these things, hopefully we can help organisations navigate through these unprecedented times.