How to Budget for Skills-Based Recruitment

We understand that as the digital age grows, it is becoming increasingly important that businesses address skills-based recruitment. However, budgets and financial requirements don’t always seem to stretch as far as you hope. Skills-based recruitment can save on hiring costs through higher-quality candidates, less employee attrition, and a faster time-to-hire.

Taking a strategic approach to your hiring process, including finding the right talent at the right time for your digital needs, can ensure that you’re getting the most out of your budget while also strengthening your workforce.

How much does skills-based recruitment cost?

Skills-based recruitment is a necessity for many businesses and industries experiencing shifting technological needs in the digital age. Whether you’re strengthening your marketing team or hiring an experienced finance manager, finding the right skills to suit your company needs can help reduce the skills gap, support company growth, and encourage development across your business.

On average, skills-based recruitment costs less than regular recruitment. By hiring based on skills and competencies, you’re likely to find candidates prepared for your roles, while also filling vacancies quicker. With reduced time-to-hire and higher-quality candidate attraction, you can expect to see increased retention from hiring the right person for the right role, you’ll experience a lower recruitment spend in the long-term.

The wrong hire can not only cost you financially, but they can also affect your productivity, morale, and reputation. The monetary costs of a wrong hire include wasted salary, training costs, compensation, and rehiring costs – all of which can amount to tens of thousands of pounds.

Why you need a skills-based recruitment strategy?

Strategic budgeting for recruitment can be one way of ensuring that you get the right talent for the right cost. Digital transformations can be a expensive change for businesses, with multiple demands needing to be met. Skills-based recruitment is all about efficiency and can enable businesses the necessary flexibility to react to changes. Whether you’re attempting internal recruitment or outsourcing your recruitment activity, ensuring that you have a budget to stick to can ensure that your business doesn’t overcommit spend without finding the right hire.

Internal recruitment, especially for new skills-based roles, can often prove difficult and inefficient for businesses. So, understanding your budget and internal capabilities is essential to finding innovative and efficient ways of hiring – ensuring that you’re getting the most out of your input.

That is why we use innovative techniques and industry insights to find candidates who can seamlessly fit into your unique workplace structure before investing time into interviewing, vetting, and onboarding. By working with a recruitment agency that is experienced in skilled-based recruitment, your business will be better able to adapt to the changing needs of the digital age.

Tips for reducing your recruitment spend

Recruitment is an investment that all businesses need at some point. Finding the right candidates, the first time, is essential to saving your business unnecessary costs and ensuring the right growth for your company.

Knowing what you’re looking for, and how to get it efficiently, can better your financial position and ensure that your business gets the most out of your recruitment budget.

Quality over quantity

It has been shown that quality recruitment is essential for many reasons beyond the immediate logic. Not only can a wrong hire cost your business through lost time, but it can also  result in compensation pay, and require additional rehiring costs to fill the gap. Finding quality candidates, fit for your roles, is essential for your workforce dynamics and productivity.

Talent mobility

Talent mobility and mapping is essential when it comes to finding skilled workers on a budget. Whether you’re analysing competitor approaches or finding the talent within your own teams, being able to offer competitive salaries and training opportunities is essential for not only bringing in the right hires, but also nurturing the talent you already have. Finding a strong recruitment partner can help you plan and develop your talent mapping strategies to find, utilise, and nurture the talents within your teams and industry.

Flexible recruitment strategies

Efficient and cost-effective recruitment needs to be flexible. Whether it is adjusting role requirements to find the right fit for your company or adopting a flexible recruitment model with an agency who allows you to be as hands-on or -off as possible, being able to control all areas of recruitment can ensure that you’re spending what you want on the areas you need the most support.

Working with a trusted recruitment agency

Internal recruitment could be costing your business more than working with a trusted recruitment partner. Hiring through your management and HR teams could be inefficient, costing you time, money, and resources. Internal teams aren’t always equipped or prepared to deal with the recruitment and workforce needs that come with organisational change, such as digital transformations.

By outsourcing your recruitment activity to a trusted partner, you can remain within budget, reduce the time needed to hire, access a wider pool of candidates, and establish trusted strategies developed for your unique business and workforce needs. A recruitment agency’s experience supporting organisational change can help businesses navigate the difficult digital age with a broader range of experience and market understanding.

Streamline your supply chain

If you already work with recruitment agencies, a complicated supply chain of multiple recruitment partners could be increasing your spend unnecessarily. Whether you’re hiring skills-based roles or looking for volume hiring, finding a sole supplier who can fulfil all your recruitment needs is essential for cutting down costs. Not only can a sole supplier manage within your budget, but it can also save you time with a single point of call for any issues or changes. This is essential when dealing with organisational change such as a digital transformation.

Tackling the digital age can be difficult for businesses, especially as you budget for training, skills recruitment, new technologies and process implementation. By working with a recruitment partner with experience hiring with digital skills in mind, you can find the right people at the right time for the right position, at the right price.

Get in touch to see how we can help support your recruitment needs within your budget.