It’s planning time! It’s time to figure out your 2016 recruiting goals, strategies and tactics. It’s also time to nail down the budget and resources you need to hit those goals. And of course, you aren’t done until you’ve convinced your boss that your budget requests are reasonable.
Last year, we published our complete 2014 Recruiting Budget for recruiters around the world to see what Glassdoor’s hiring goals were and how we accomplished them. This year, we’re updating that analysis with some of our 2015 metrics. And, read on to learn:
- How a growing startup scales their recruiting team while trying to hire hundreds of people
- How Glassdoor allocated budget to our recruiting programs in 2015
- Our source of hire breakdown in 2015 (no surprise, it’s similar to data we find on Glassdoor interview reviews)
- How we overcome location challenges
We originally published our Recruiting Budget Template in 2014 because many times, recruiting teams are unable to publish these documents publicly and struggle to see how they stack up against similar companies.
Last year, when we first released this template publicly, we did quite a few Google and SlideShare searches to see if anyone had shared their budget frameworks. We came up empty-handed. And, it’s a bummer when you miss something in planning and have to wait another year to invest in a high-impact program that your peers are already doing, so we decided to take the plunge and publish ours, hoping it would help other companies along the way.
Today Glassdoor has about 550 employees in three primary offices located in Northern California, Ohio and London. We are a seven-year-old startup, we’re growing fast and we pay close attention to how we’re scaling our teams and allocating our recruiting budget. If you run recruiting for either a small business or a rapidly growing startup with similar challenges, we hope this post (and a downloadable template) helps you with your planning as well as with developing a compelling case with your boss for sufficient budget to hit your 2016 objectives.
By sharing this info, you may be able to poke holes in our budget allocation and planning process – that’s okay with us – if there is a better way, we want to know.
How we arrived at our 2015 recruiting budget
First, let’s outline some of the major challenges we faced that we had to remedy in 2015. Here are the top three:
Challenge #1: Our recruiting team still needed to grow, and quickly.
We ended 2014 with a team of seven recruiters. We had to recruit recruiters to recruit – a fun challenge to say the least! Knowing the cadence of hiring needed for 2015, roughly 200 new hires, that recruiting team number needed to jump to 10. And, of course we had to cover for expected attrition too. Today we stand at 10 recruiters, which allowed us to hit (and exceed!) our hiring goals for 2015.
Challenge #2: Most of our hiring had to happen in the first half of the year.
As a startup that’s growing quickly, we hired over 200 people in 2014 and grew even more in 2015. And, most of the hires for the year needed to happen within the first six months of 2015. In contrast, in 2014, most of the hires happened in the second half of the year, so we had time to build out our team and ramp recruiters.
To do this, we built out our recruiting team in the second half of 2014 so that they were ramped and ready to hire early on in 2015. The key to hiring early on is being as prepared as humanly possible -- this will help you jump into the New Year ready to meet all of your hiring goals.
Here, you can see how we broke down our recruiting programs spend in 2015 between recruiting systems, relocation expenses, job advertising and more:
As a result of those program investments, here are our source-of-hire metrics. As you can see, almost half of our hires came from employee referrals, while recruiting on our own platform, Glassdoor, was a close second (read more about why interview sources matter in hiring on the Glassdoor Economic Research blog).
Challenge #3: The benefits and challenges of a unique headquarters location.
Glassdoor sits along a beautiful body of water just north of San Francisco. For many Marin locals or city-dwellers, the commute takes anywhere from five to 20 minutes. However, for would-be tech talent or engineers commuting from the South Bay, it probably isn’t your “dream commute”.
To remedy this situation in 2015, we added vanpools for people commuting from the city or other Bay Area locations to make their commutes easier. We also expanded our hiring in both Mill Valley and London, and announced a new office opening in Dublin, Ireland in early 2016.
Summary 2015 recruiting budget and goals
All in all, it wasn’t an easy task, but we hit our hiring goals for 2015, worked in new tools and systems and found new ways to attract top talent in the Bay Area and other important markets. Almost half of our hires came from employee referrals, showing the power in our internal employee referral program. We grew our recruiting team from seven to 10 people. We spent our recruiting programs budget on line items including job advertising, our employee referral program, events and travel costs. Lastly, we allocated a good portion of our budget on our recruiting team, including salaries, benefits, taxes and bonuses.
Want the full Excel document? Our full 2015 Budget Template will allow you to fill in your own data from 2015 to set hiring goals, organize and track budget categories and model potential spending plan efforts for 2016.
We would love to see other companies share their format and categories of their budget with the larger recruiting community. If you are willing to share it on the Glassdoor blog, please comment below.
