Slash Your Recruiting Costs AND Your Turnover

When was the last time your job advertising eliminated 80% of your employee turnover? 

I’ve written about how bad job ads tend to attract only desperate candidates, wasting your time and money.   But let’s face it – candidates from job boards still fill a lot of your open jobs.  So for most companies, improving the performance of your recruitment advertising will have an outsized impact on your ability to attract top performers, control your recruiting costs, and hold down the cost of employee turnover.  

When I refer to the ”performance” of your advertising  I am not referring to how many resumes you get – more is not necessarily better, and often worse.  No, I’m referring to your ability to reliably, predictably recruit the calibre of people you need, exactly when you need them, at the lowest possible cost.

Great ads give you leverage – once they work,  you can use them over and over again, keeping your candidate pipeline full, and dramatically reducing your downtime (time-to-fill) between hires. 

We helped one of our clients eliminate agency fees, cut employee turnover 80% in a critical job, and build a very low cost candidate pipeline for people with specialized skills. . . simply by improving their online advertising:

• Turnover in the position in 2006 was 27 people. 
• Turnover in the position in 2007 was 21 people. 
• We developed and ran the new ad for them in late 2007, resulting in 5 hires from the initial slate of of 8 candidates.  The client then ran the ad on their own a few times in 2008, resulting in an additional 5 hires. (10 hires that year from the same ad). 
• Turnover in the position in 2008 was just 5 people – an 80% reduction.   Also, agency fees in 2008 were eliminated. 
• Managers who formerly lived in fear of turnover are finally free to manage employee performance courageously,  knowing with certainty that if someone is not working out, they can be replaced quickly and at low cost.   

That’s the kind of leverage smart online outreach can give you.

A side benefit of great advertising can be the the impact it has on the perception of your firm among people who may want to work for you in the future.  Another client just got this response to their ad:  

“As a job seeker, I read a plethora of ads…and yours stood out.  Most postings are impersonal, cookie-cutter lists of “You need to do items A thru Q.  Apply now.”  Your ad projects the importance of the employee being an integral and meaningful part of the organization.  Who they are and the skills and experience they bring to the table will genuinely matter.  It was personal and appealing.”

Are you getting this kind of leverage from your ads?  If not here are a few good sources for more information:

• How to write job descriptions that don’t totally stink.
• Writing a Great Employment Ad
• Make Jobs Ads Personal