Effective and Efficient Recruiting

With the economy improving, there are more employment opportunities and managers spending more time on recruitment. Managers without support of a recruiter or human resource professional may be realizing what a daunting task this can be. The question then becomes, Where do I start? There are so many avenues open to hiring managers.  Sourcing avenues include recruiters, job boards, newspapers, magazines, radio ads, movie theater ads, job fairs, nonprofit organizations, unemployment offices, and now social networking sites to name a few. Are you overwhelmed yet?

It can be overwhelming at the beginning, but once you find a process that works for your organization, you will be able to efficiently and effectively fill your open positions. A route that many organizations employ is utilizing a staffing agency. Staffing agencies will eliminate a lot of the front-end work with recruiting. Working with a staffing agency can provide you as much support as needed, such as: help with sourcing, testing, prescreening, and applicant tracking as required by law. In the end, you want to choose from the top candidates that are available and presented to you from the agency.

While working with an agency eliminates some of the stress that comes with recruiting, it is not free. Agencies can charge up to and sometimes even more than 30 percent of the new hire's base salary. For example, a $30,000 position can cost you a fee of $9,000. Most agencies will put a guarantee on their hires for a certain amount of time, offering a refund of the fees or a replacement. With a little negotiation, you can match a process to your budget. If you're able to partner with an agency for a period of time, they'll be better able to understand your business, needs, and the ability to sell your company to prospective candidates.

For those managers without the budget to use agencies, there are other ways to recruit for your open positions that can be less expensive. For less than $500, you might want to consider job boards such as Monster, Careerbuilder, or something more local like NHjobs.com. Postings on such sites allow you to add a job profile, your company logo and web address, and how you want to candidates to respond to your opening (mail, fax, email, or other). To help with sorting out all the candidates that might be interested, most of these sites will allow you to create filters (such as qualification questions) that will narrow down the candidate pool for you. Monster has reported 23 million unique visitors for online searches and over 78 million readers through their Sunday partnerships with other sites.

One of the up and coming avenues for recruiting is social media. Social media has quickly become an avenue for networking, marketing and branding and is now a solid strategy for recruiting. If you have a Twitter account and a decent amount of followers, you can tweet job opportunities and it's free. If your followers find it exciting, then they can retweet your posts to their followers. The whole process can go viral before you know it. 

Another source for online recruiting is LinkedIn. You can buy job postings on the LinkedIn site for less than $200 or you can purchase a package of postings with additional search and mail features for an additional fee. Once your job post is live, your employees and contacts can share the posting with their contacts. Even if you don't have a posting, you can search your contacts and your contacts' contacts for key words that match your job requirements. If you find someone of interest, you can send then an in-mail or ask your contact for an introduction. It's a great way to find qualified candidates within reach as well as a way to target your search.

Finally, we have a lot of great non-profit organizations and government agencies available to NH employers. The unemployment office will advertise your job postings. Although the unemployment rate in NH is low, this is the first place many unemployed job seekers go to for new opportunities. Their site, www.nhworks.org, offers resources for job seekers as well as employers, and there is currently no cost to post ads.

There are agencies that will get your advertisements in front of veterans for no cost as well. The Value of a Veteran is a great spot for resources and training on hiring veterans. They offer a guide to speed your search for trained and reliable talent by using veteran hiring agencies. The NH Department of Labor also has a branch dedicated to helping organizations recruit specifically for veterans. 

When it comes to recruiting there are numerous options available to employers. We touched upon a few of these options here. There are many more options that we didn't get into including college recruiting and media advertising. Finding the right option or the right mix of options for your organization depends on how much time you can spend on recruiting as well as how much money you can or want to spend. 

Michelle Strasburger is human resources manager with Americas-Axis Communications and Mike Klyop is project manager with United Health Care.