A reader asks RecruitAdvisory ….
What does it cost to recruit and onboard a new employee?
The direct and fairly easy to measure costs would include costs of advertising and promotion and any fees paid to recruiters or others, HR/Admin staff time to review resumes and schedule interviews, other staff to read resumes, then interview and discuss candidates, other parts of the hiring process, like assessments and background checks, (over-)time done by others to complete work of vacant positions offset by savings by not paying someone to do the work, and finally the cost of getting the new hires onboarded, up to speed, and fully productive.
The UK’s CIPD publishes an annual recruitment survey, which currently estimates the average cost of recruiting a new member of staff to be £4k, although there is a huge range from £700 for manual workers to £10k for senior managerial staff, and I have to say that most employers responding to that survey are either plucking a figure out of thin air (yes, a very large financial services client of mine and a CIPD member did just that!), looking at their Accounts Payable Recruitment cost centre, or taking figures from their recruitment system (which themselves regard Cost Per Hire as mainly what you pay outside sources).
Instead of trying to get an accurate cost to recruit and onboard a new employee, why not focus on the flipside, and look at how much revenue they bring in (or how much cost they reduce if they are back office), and then see how you can squeeze cost out of acquiring more of that talent in the future?
Tags: CIPD, cost per hire, onboarding
03/01/2011 at 9:46 am
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