Company recruiting strategies - How to reduce your recruitment costs in four easy steps

Many companies find it difficult to recruit people with specialist skills and knowledge. For companies that recruit regularly, recruitment costs are becoming a major headache. It is one that can be addressed quite quickly though. Have you thought about taking control of this process yourself and doing some of the recruitment directly? This concept is not as scary as it sounds, it just needs some careful thoughts and strategic planning with somebody with solid recruitment expertise, and very quickly you should see your recruitments costs decreasing.

There are four main areas that could you address with regards to setting up direct company recruiting strategies:

1. Company website - this should be your primary tool
Looking at your website is the first thing a prospective employee will do to ascertain what you are like as a company, and whether they want to work for your organisation, and if you have any relevant vacancies - after all good candidates will have a lot of choice!

- Create an appealing website that would make a prospective employee want to work for your company

- Create a careers page/job page and simply place the jobs online

2. Your Staff - your best/worse sales tool
Your staff can be the best (and the worst) sales tool for your company, but if you trust in them and reward and appreciate them accordingly, they will recruit people for you.

- Have an employee referral scheme in place

- Communicate the schema to the business

- Inform staff of the positions you are recruiting for

- Recruit internally, promote your staff

- Encourage your staff to network amongst their peers

3. Sell not tell - creative job advert writing
Candidates are getting choosy so get their attention with your job advert. Don‘t simply place a job spec in an advert and expect good people to be attracted to it. You need to sell them the opportunity and sell them your company. If you were looking for a job and looked at a boring job description advert, would you pick up the phone to apply?

- Make it appealing and attractive

4. Keep what you have got - it is far easier to retain than recruit
A happy workforce is a productive workforce, so make sure you think of them first as it is so much easier to retain staff rather than having to find new employees.

- Make sure they are happy working for you

- Keep communication channels open

- Provide your staff with the opportunity to develop their skills

- Give your staff the credit and praise when they deserve it

- Encourage regular feedback from your staff

- Have retention strategies in place; it is absolutely essential to maintaining happy and loyal employees

There are many other ways that companies can reduce their recruitment costs, but the four steps above are a good starting point, and combined with good specialist recruitment advice they can all be implemented relatively quickly.

HAPPY RECRUITING:-)

Are you banning a potential business tool - Facebook versus LinkedIn

There’s a lot happening in virtual networking space. First, there is huge potential for employers to use social networks as a business tool to engage with a large audience and market their products and services to potential customers and employees.

I my opinion social networks are a large potential for recruitment, marketing and sales opportunity for organisations. They are where people are hanging out in ever-increasing numbers. You target a large audience of people from many different backgrounds, locations, with different religions, interests. You visit your target markets, determine what motivates them, find out how they communicate with others and how they expect you to effectively target and build relationships with them.

Quite a few organisations block access to social networking sites like Facebook. Yes, some employers have experienced hassles from a small number of employees spending too much time “social networking” with friends during work time, reducing productivity.

It’s perfectly fair for an employer to investigate whether productivity has slipped due to time spent on social networking sites, but is it fair to block all employees just because one or two have a problem? I believe that Facebook might be a solid source of potential candidates. The site is rather strong in the U.S. and rapidly growing in the UK. Facebook works well for graduate recruitment and junior roles because your target audience tends to share their ideas, thoughts, experience with other users. They aim to build a huge network of people based all around the world and share virtual experiences. Absolute must for young professionals! I am a bit skeptical about using Facebook for senior recruitment though. Why? I am still not convinced that those people has discovered the benefits and beauty of virtual networking space yet.

LinkedIn is an interesting global business tool. It’s a pure business networking platform where users show their professional faces, grow their networks, post jobs, and ask business-related questions. Sometimes, it feels a bit like putting your CV online. Recruiters use LinkedIn like "online CV database". LinkedIn is not blocked by the organisations; they support it and encourage their employees to use it effectively. I have noticed that LinkedIn is also developing and changing its image. You can download phone and personalized your profile. I am sure LinkedIn will soon be launching a lot of new features and tools similar to those Facebook released mid-year. I believe these developments will make LinkedIn more interesting in a business application sense, and you may be missing out if your candidate or business partner is on there but you’re not!

When applying for a role with Cisco Systems

To someone outside of the company, Cisco Systems can be a bit complicated to understand. A great place to start is our career page.Here you can apply for your dream job directly or search by region, location or area of interest.

Here at Cisco, we believe the most important change to the network experience is upon us. We develop programes and policies to support our employees' work-life integration and provide a stimulating work environment to foster their development. We will not only change the way you work, play and learn – we will change life experience.

A question often asked of new recruits is what is your understanding of our business? Before you speak with the Recruiter, it is anticipated that you have done your research. Prior to the interview it is well worth the effort to dedicate some time learning about the organization that you are interviewing with.

Networking is a good place to start, if you do not know anyone personally within the organization, take advantage of the wealth of information available on the company corporate website, in journals and periodicals. I would also recommend to check out video about a day at Cisco.

Preparing for the interview will help you align your career objectives with the company goals and greatly assist you in formulating good questions for your interviewer. Posing good questions in an interview tells the interviewer you have “done your research” and it shows your real interest in the company.

Emerging Markets Recruitment Blog

This blog is a semi-personal journal that offers the opinions, experiences and thoughts on sourcing and recruitment in Emerging Markets along with links to other relevant websites and articles. On this blog, I want to share best practices, experiences about the sourcing and recruiting processes in Emerging Markets, interesting tips for potential candidates and other relevant information for those interested in Cisco Systems recruitment or recruitment for Emerging Markets.