Traditional hiring costs have skyrocketed as the shortage of essential workers continues, and many companies still struggle to meet hiring goals, because they don’t know the real costs to reach the right candidates. A new report from the data-driven job and hiring event advertising platform, Talroo, and Brandon Hall Group identifies the top recruiting challenges companies are facing, their implications and the cost to hire an essential worker.

An insufficient pipeline is the most common challenge in creating a top-tier talent acquisition (TA) program for 48% of the survey respondents. However, that challenge was not due to lack of investment. In this report, the TA budget was divided for respondents between the $0-500K or $500K+ range, with the latter used to calculate spend on other parts of the essential worker hiring process.

In 2021, 25% of respondents had a TA budget of more than $2M, and 20% had a budget up to $100K. On average, organizations spent 31% of their annual TA budget on hiring essential workers, with $85K spent on TA technology and $120K on TA services. The amount of time it takes to hire an essential worker is 44 days on average, with 17% of the employees participating in some stage of the process.

Talroo offers the following seven recruiting solutions for organizations seeking to hire essential workers more efficiently:

• Eliminate Friction in Interviewing and Hiring – 69% of survey respondents identified a broken interview process as having the greatest impact on the eventual quality of hire for all workers. Job applications should be mobile-friendly and the interview should be reflective of the job description.
• Leverage Organizational Culture and Benefits – engagement boost with job applicants increased 83% when flexibility was mentioned and 67% for culture. Transparency is key and candidates respond to targeted messaging clearly outlining flexibility, competitive wages, culture and work/life benefits.
• Create Alignment with Organization Priorities – Treat every candidate like a potential customer and ensure that the people hired match up with organizational goals.
• Don’t Be Overly Strict with Job Descriptions and Experience Requirements – previous Brandon Hall Group research showed that a candidate’s number of skills matching the job description didn’t correlate with hiring success. A better indicator was organizational fit and hiring manager satisfaction. Allowing for a range of skills, competencies and behaviors results in a better hire.
• Large-Scale Hiring Events Work – a Talroo 2021 survey showed 61% of job seekers would be interested in attending an in-person hiring event. These are most beneficial for filling high-volume, high turnover positions.
• Use Non-Traditional Recruitment Sources – include TA technology and services that cast a wider recruitment net and allow hyper-customization of messaging to target an exact candidate match.
• Improve the Use of Talent Acquisition Analytics – 90% of organizations say their hires are not quality hires. This can be greatly improved by making TA analytics a regular part of an organization’s recruiting. By connecting standard recruitment metrics like source-of-hire, cost-per-hire, and time-to-hire with performance and tenure data, organizations can begin to focus on sourcing ROI.

“Findings showed organizations could be hiring essential workers much more efficiently, while reducing costs and improving the candidate experience,” said Thad Price, CEO of Talroo. “Our research found gaps across the entire hiring process in accountability, communication of the organization’s brand, and recruitment of non-standard employees such as contingent, part-time and contract workers. For most organizations, there is room for improvement for executing a more objective and data-driven approach to hiring essential workers,” concluded Price.