One of my favourite lines in sales is “good, fast and cheap, pick any two and I’ll tell you what it won’t be”.
On the face of it, this headline appears to check all three boxes. Let’s look at the challenges.
Good Candidates
The economy is booming, with the lowest unemployment in 18 years and an increasing reliance on domestic employees with the number of H1B visas for foreign workers down for the second year in a row.
All of this wraps up into shortfalls right across the board for white collar workers. While blue collar wages appear to have skyrocketed and left white collar wage increases behind, I can say from my observations of my US based clients, that there is very definitely upward pressure on wages.
Quickly
The candidate search falls in to three stages;
- preparation
- search
- selection.
Preparation happens as soon as the vacancy arises for whatever reason and includes approval to hire and the writing of the job spec.
Search begins as soon as the employer starts looking, whether it be through job postings, advertising, job boards or using an agency.
Selection is obviously the collation of suitable candidates and interviewing.
Now here’s where things get sticky.
Some estimates say that it takes around 90 days to fill a job if you’re not using an agency but it can take as little as 30 days on average if you are using an agency.
A Glassdoor study in 2017 indicated that the US government takes around 53 days to complete the interview process, and that’s just to interview! Let’s throw an approval process on to the beginning and reference, background and security checks on to the end and it really gets painful.
And the problem is that the search phase is completely out of your control so easily drags on as you wait …………….and wait…………and wait……….
Cost Effectively
I’ve owned a staffing company for 20 years, I know how expensive we are. As I tell my clients, “you’re paying for my failures”. Leaving that aside, I have 6 kids and they all need new shoes.
Even if you go the in-house route, you’re still stuck with average costs of around 12% of first year’s salary by the time that you factor in everybody’s time in house and costs of advertising or posting and then the painful sift of candidates.
I designed this pdf infographic to give a shorthand version of some of the challenges of recruiting.
So What’s a Girl or a Guy to do?
Good
A shortlist of 25-40 suitable candidates
Fast
Inside 3 days.
Cheap
For around 400 bucks
Want to know More?
Check out www.search-lite.co(yep, no “m”) to see how we can help you.
We’re now front ending every head hunt with Search-Lite, it’s that level of expediency in sourcing good candidates that we started to commercialize.
And if you’re not sure if it can work for you, drop us a note at [email protected] for a free trial and to find out more.
