We've heard from recruiters over and over again that determining the right recruitment budget can be difficult. There are so many factors at play, such as company size, job openings and budget allocations. This raises the question: Is there an easy way to create a recruiting budget in Excel? The answer: Yes! We'll show you how.
How to Build a Recruiting Budget
Here are five simple steps that will help you build a recruiting budget:
1. Determine Your Personnel Budget
Employers often ask Glassdoor if they should factor in personnel cost into their cost-per-hire. This is entirely up to each company's discretion, but I want to warn you that it can significantly impact cost-per-hire calculations. Whether you factor this into your cost-per-hire ratio or not, you must list out each job title needed on the team, include hiring dates and track salary impact per headcount by quarter to determine an appropriate personnel budget. To accurately forecast total cost, be sure to add 30% to total to fully account for benefits, taxes, T&E, etc. Also, include any contractor or part-time employees that you plan to bring on during the year.
[Related: Post Jobs Today]
2. Factor in Program and Systems Fees
With so many factors, your recruiting budget can easily balloon. Elements include implementing a CRM system, managing social accounts, posting jobs online, running employee referral programs, revamping your career site, adding photos and videos that reflect your culture, installing recruiting analytics tools and investing in your employer brand.
You will need to account for the fees involved with each system and ensure you keep track of campaign lengths. According to a recent Harris survey of employers, an employer brand alone can typically amount to a $129,000 annual investment. Ensuring that you have enough budget to cover recruiting tools and fees is important to win the war for talent!
3. Estimate an Annual Expected Number of Hires
Coming up with your recruiting budget breakdown by program requires estimating the number of job openings per year. Break this down by quarter to see what budget needs to be spent on each channel when. At Glassdoor, we look at every channel we use for our job ads and determine what we will spend on each by quarter based on our open number of positions.
4. Track the Cost of Events
On the Glassdoor marketing team, we know that staging events is time-consuming and definitely not cheap. Whether you are a small business looking to build awareness via career fairs or an enterprise looking to host meet-ups that help candidates in becoming familiar with your brand, it can be an expensive initiative. Be sure to consider all the events that you will be hosting or attending during the year to come up with an accurate budget.
[Related: Cool and Innovative Recruiting Strategies You May Want to Try]
5. Include an Employee Referral Bonus Program
Last, be sure you consider your spend on employee referral bonus programs. At some companies, 50% or more of hires can come through employee referrals. Having a strong program in place ensures success and rewards your employees for introducing you to new candidates. Be sure to factor in fees that you will pay for hard-to-fill positions then multiply that by half the openings that you will have throughout the year, depending on the ratio of employees that you receive through word of mouth.
