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Recruitment – Minimise Its Affect On The Bottom Line

When staff turnover or productivity starts to affect your company’s bottom line, it could be time to look more closely at how you hire.

A common assumption is there is a need to deal with the immediately apparent problem by working on productivity or dealing with the turnover directly and hiring again as fast as possible. In many cases, however, an expensive Human Resources issue can be traced back to the hiring process and solved there.

How you recruit new staff can affect many areas of a business and the process itself becomes expensive if poor recruitment decisions create a loop of staff turnover.

By considering what it costs to hire new staff, you can gain insight into how choosing the right staff and managing them well, saves your company money.

The costs include:

  • Job vacancy advertising
  • Interviewing time
  • New staff training
  • Reduced productivity during initial phases of employment
  • Reduced productivity of existing staff who assist the newcomer
  • Lost opportunities during time no one is in the role

Equally, it important to know when to terminate a staff member, cutting your losses and starting again – Incurring the recruitment cost rather than persevering with performance measures to overcome productivity issues is sometimes the better option and results in a better outcome for that position in the long term.

During the recruitment itself, a key factor, is to have certainty of what the role requirements are. What does this role need to achieve? 
Clear guidelines of expected outputs and results assist with choosing the correct person for a job.

All too often, roles have developed by an employee taking on responsibilities unique to their skillset and quire difficult to replace in a single person – a graphic designer who also has a copywriting background in Japanese or an in-house lawyer who has photography and Photoshop expertise.

It will be difficult to exactly replace this person because the skill sets for the role were built around them. It is important to take a step back and map out what you want from the job, what are the needs of the company and what are the skill sets you truly need to achieve this. 

Another common issue faced in recruitment is the staff member doing the hiring can be under-trained for the purposes of managing HR. The last thing you want to hear from a your decision maker is that “I liked him” or “I went with my instincts and chose…”

Interviewing is a specific skill. Without this skill it can be difficult to know which questions to ask and to know which further questions to ask, during an interview, to ensure the best candidate to fill the role requirements, is hired.

Less commonly known, is that what you ask in an interview could cause legal issues down the track. If your interviewer did not realise it was illegal to ask in an applicant has children and asks, if the applicant does not get the job they could have recourse against your company for you no hiring them due to the parent status.

You can avoid all the major issues, especially if you do not have a dedicated HR department, by approaching JP Smith for advice or to manage recruitment processes on your behalf.

JP Smith has a team dedicated to isolating specific role requirements and who are trained in effective interview techniques. With a track record successfully placing long-standing staff members into businesses across all industries, we are here to help you. Call 07 4659 7400 for more information.

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