How to evaluate your in-house recruitment processes

In the second instalment of our blog mini-series we take a closer look at how to evaluate your business’ in-house recruitment procedures and offer some practical advice on how to find out if you’re getting a good ROI.

Time to hire

When it comes to in house recruitment the most important metric to measure is your time to hire.

A prolonged internally driven recruitment campaign not only adds up to more money being spent – a resource drain for a business – but also has a knock-on effect on the rest of the business, and especially the department dealing with a skills shortage while you search for the right person.

An internally led recruitment drive needs to be optimised to deliver maximum results with a short turnaround to ensure the business doesn’t go without the necessary skills for a long period of time.

This could be from optimising job descriptions to grab the attention of the best candidates, to researching the best specialised job boards to post your adverts.

Research and feedback

Internal recruitment managers should put specific focus on getting feedback from successful candidates to constantly evaluate their processes and ensure they are getting a good ROI, compared to bringing in outside help.

If your internal recruitment is costing more than an external agency would, then what’s the point?

Even just a short Survey Monkey or face-to-face reviews would uncover mountains of useful information.

Another key benefit of doing this is that successful candidates essentially become your recruitment network, capable of referring and identifying other suitable candidates you can approach during your next recruitment drive.

Diversity, equality and inclusion are also vital for internal recruitment and larger organisations in particular need to pay attention to these areas and gather data on whether their recruitment policies produce acceptable results.

This is not just best practice; internal recruitment must ensure that the business is viewed as an equal opportunity employer, not just to attract the best candidates but to avoid any run in with controversy.

Mapped out career paths

Young people entering the workplace today are more likely to want to see where their career will go if they come to work for you, and your recruitment process must reflect this.

Whether in the job description or, more likely, during interviews, giving candidates a clear vision of their promotional and development prospects will give you a far greater chance of turning them into your next employee.

And don’t keep these details to yourself, shout about them.

If you’re a company that readily trains and promotes from within, you’re more likely to be viewed as a great place to work.

ROI

The key thing to consider if you’re going to run recruitment as an internal function, is how your ROI compares to bringing in an external agency.

At the point at which your internal efforts are costing more time and effort than an agency would do, it might be time to reconsider.

Some internal recruiters tend to bring in agencies to handle some of their recruitment, like specific roles when having an expert with industry contacts can bring in better results than running the process yourself.

A metric to consider here is the percentage of roles hired through running recruitment yourself, against that of an agency.

Some businesses, like FMCG businesses, are looking for a 90% or above hire rate from their own efforts before they’ll deem it a success; some will look to hire as much as 98% of people themselves and outsource the final 2% to an agency.

At every stage you should be evaluating the process and ensure that by taking this function in house you aren’t putting your business under extra strain and financial pressures.