In this video the Caissa founder Konstanty Sliwowski talks about the cost of recruitment. Below is a transcript of his discussion.
Recruitment is expensive. There. I said it.
But before you start clapping your hands and saying "I told you so and I always knew it that those recruitment agencies are overcharging us" hear me out.
The average cost of making an engineering hire in Berlin based on client interviews and market data is between 110 and 240 hours. Yup, that is right. I have used time as a currency here. Because time is exactly what you are paying with when you are recruiting. Mind you this is not the time of a single person. When recruiting you need to involve multiple people from the hiring manager, through HR and the team. It is a hugely disruptive process across the organisation.Aside from interviews there is also the time needed to review CV's and all of this before even considering the time required to screen the active and passive candidate market, and effectively engage with suitable candidates. Not to mention following up, providing feedback and even the oh so basic task of scheduling and rescheduling interviews. Oh and even with all that effort the chances your offer will be accepted in the end stand at about 67% thus meaning you have an over 30% chance that you will need to repeat the hiring process again. Fun.
So what you say, there is a lot of people out there who want to work for us. We get a lot of direct applications. Well this may be true but if you are getting those direct applications so are others. In fact most people when looking for jobs send out 10-15 applications per week so imagine how engaged they are.
So let us think this through, are you in the business of developing products and delivering a service to your customers? In that case should your team not be focused on your product instead of interviewing the market average of 33.8 candidates for every hire you make?
What is their time worth to your business? What if the number of candidates your team needs to interview can be reduced to only 5? What if 90% of your job offers were accepted? How much more time would you have to focus on your products and your customers?
Maybe you are simply paying for recruitment with the wrong currency? Your own time away from your core business.
