By Joe Redshaw
What is the internal cost to hiring a candidate – reviewing interviews, selecting the short list, scheduling interview in terms of lost productivity of interviewers/peer reviews?
This is a tough question and could be different for many companies. Cost of hiring a candidate can be a chapter by itself.
You really should look at it from a company standpoint. Is the position open at that time? If so, what is the lost productivity of that person? And what other employees are helping fill in?
A recruiter or HR person needs to post, source, review and screen resumes. Just posting a resume on Monster, Dice, Hot Jobs or LinkedIn could be hundreds of dollars. The screening process could take weeks. Then the hiring manager needs to review the resumes. If the first person did a good job screening it may not take too much time from the manager.
Then you have to team interview a candidate. If the average person on the team made $30/hr and the interview lasted 4 hours, then you just paid $120 to interview the candidate. And we know that number is low. There is the time away from each person’s job. So if you have to interview 5 people to fill the job, it could be quite a bit of money and time away from your desk.
And if the process takes 45 days to finally get someone in that seat, how much money is lost? A salesperson in some companies can sell thousands of dollars in 45 days. The new hire now needs to ramp up and probably won’t be productive for at least a few weeks. More potential for lost money. And then there is the people who have to help train the new hire. What are they not getting done because they have to spend time with the new employee?
In the end, it could easily cost thousands and thousands of dollars.
About Joe Redshaw
Joe Redshaw is the Corporate Recruiter for Gomez, the Web Performance Division of Compuware. He has been a recruiter for almost 10 years and has experience on the agency and corporate side. Joe has screened thousands of candidates and has agreed to provide NEJS his perspective on HR/Recruiter practices.
NEJS encourages you to start a dialogue with Joe by submitting your questions via the comments section at the end of the blog article. Keep an eye out for more Q & A with Joe.
In any economic climate job hunting is nobody’s idea of fun. And with the growing number of folks hitting the bricks these days it seems the task is getting even harder. But that’s not precisely true because the actual job-hunting strategies and techniques required of the professional job changer remain the same in any climate. What is bothersome, however, is that the process is quite likely to take longer. This leads to increased stress: financial stress, physical stress, emotional stress and family stress.
