Recruitment is time-consuming, expensive, and risky. Hours of selection activity may result in no suitable applicants, or worse, a recruit who doesn’t stay, or the nightmare of a toxic recruit who causes damage to your business before you can terminate their employment. The CIPD estimates the average cost of recruiting the wrong candidate at £8,200 for a non-manager. 
Attracting and appointing the right recruit also incurs risk. You will need to ensure you have enough cashflow to pay a regular wage or salary, regardless of the level of work the organisation has. 
 
If you are considering recruitment, here are some questions to ask before you make your decision. 
 
1) Is this a long term, permanent increase in workload, or is this level of work likely to last no more than a few weeks or months? 
2) Is there any way of reorganising the way we currently work, to improve our efficiency and effectiveness? 
3) Could we make better use of technology to save time and enable us to absorb more work? 
4) Are there other time management techniques we could adopt, to make more productive use of our time? 
 
Having streamlined as much of your workload as possible, if you still have a need for additional resource, it is worth considering whether temporary solutions might be more appropriate than permanent recruitment. For example, you might look at: 
 
- Using associates or freelancers working on a self-employed basis 
- Agency workers 
- Other outsourcing options such as virtual assistants, bookkeepers or copywriters. These can be contracted for single activities or longer term work, and usually have a wealth of skills and experience enabling them to offer a range of services. 
 
Although, at face value, these might look expensive, they could work out cheaper in the long run if your need for additional resource is temporary or fluctuating. Remember to compare the full costs of direct employment, including employer’s national insurance, pension auto-enrolment, holiday pay, sick pay, and the costs of employer’s liability insurance and running a payroll if this is your first employee. 
 
Outsourced workers should be able to “hit the ground running” because they already have the skills and experience needed to step into the role with minimal supervision. Temporary work is a great way of conducting an extended job interview – if the need for extra resource does become permanent you may be able to recruit directly from your outsourced workforce. 
 
By this stage, if you have decided that, after exploring all other options, recruitment is necessary, you’ll need to think about who you are looking for and where to find them. We’ll look at this next time, but if you can't wait that long, give me a call and I'll be happy to help. 
Tagged as: Better HR, Recruitment
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