Is it possible to hire two high calibre people for less than £250 in recruitment costs? Yes, but you have to put in the time. Here’s how.
Most business owners and managers will have experience with recruitment processes from time-to-time. Lead Wolf has just hired two great people through an in-house managed process that cost us just £249 (plus about 2-3 days).
So why did we decide to do it in-house? Agencies are highly convenient, often have access to a pool of talent they can recruit from quickly and can provide you with a shortlist to interview promptly. There will always be a case for using a good agency but, in this instance, we decided to go it alone.
With agency fees typically starting at no less than 15% of basic salary, you’ll seldom find yourself paying less than £4,500 to hire someone. As a result, the time involved on our part was worth it to save over £10,000.
So, how did we source high-quality candidates quickly and use a well-structured interview process to ensure we got the right people? By following this process:
- Use an Applicant Tracking System. The last thing you want is candidate CVs, questions etc. coming into your email inbox. We used our www.recruitee.com account ($90/pm on a monthly subscription). In here, we created a job profile linked to a Lead Wolf branded recruitment site that candidates would apply via. We created a job specification and person description.
- Once this was all set up, we connected this to a Pay-Per-Click campaign we set up on www.indeed.co.uk
- Overall, we spent £56 on PPC and from this, we got about 70 CV’s that passed our screening questions. These are specific questions to screen out unsuitable candidates. From there, our team were able to manually sift through, excluding the obviously unsuitable.
- The next stage of the process I consider extremely important. We used a software called www.BRYQ.com to conduct pre-interview assessments and personality trait testing. This testing gives you two things- a directly comparable, bias-free means of evaluating your applicants, as well as a series of questions pertaining to their personality traits to ask in during an interview.
- We sent out approximately 25 invitations to complete the testing (which includes webcam use to make sure it is the person it should be completing the tests) and 19 completed them in the time permitted.
- Once we had the test results, we reviewed them in conjunction with the CVs and selected five candidates for interview, all of whom had placed in the top ten of test results.
- The end result was a decision to hire two fantastic candidates with a third as being potentially suitable for a role in the future.
- We used the same Recruitee System to issue offers, as well as getting reference details from previous employers and universities and obtain ID etc.
Our requirement was for people who had previous account management roles in digital agencies, that were Google Ads certified, degree educated and ideally had excellent foreign language skills. We succeeded in attracting suitable candidates in a timely fashion for less than £250.