As the end of the year approaches, it's crucial to reflect on your recruiting and hiring budget for 2016 so you can fine tune your spending strategy for 2017.
To help you fully assess every budget-related detail, we created this plug-and-play spreadsheet that will take one team-member a morning to populate. It's a powerful tool for analyzing:
- Where you need more resources
- Where you can re-allocate and save money
- How to build on last year's good results
Use it to help you and your executive team evaluate the past year and better forecast for the coming fiscal year.
This spreadsheet comes pre-loaded with all the formulas to calculate the following information to plan for 2017:
Hires Per Month Per Department & Average Time-to-Fill
By entering how many staff members were hired per department per month - and the average time it took to fill those positions, hiring patterns are pulled into focus. This can help in two ways: 1) you can be better prepared for known peaks in hiring, and 2) you can plan ahead for better pacing if hiring is not tied to seasonal shifts. You'll also be able to see which departments brought on the most employees total over the course of last year, which can shed light on trends in your business that need to be addressed going forward.
Source of Hire Year-to-Date
If you're not looking closely at where your candidates originated, you're missing an important piece of information that can help you spend recruiting budget more strategically next year. Whether your new hires came from a recruiter, Glassdoor post, employee referral or a college fair, it can be enlightening to see exactly what strategy worked best. It's also important to keep track of this information over time so you stay fresh on what's working now. For example, it's possible that job fairs were the prime source for top talent last year, but that employee referrals or another source might be most productive next year.
Recruiting Team Growth & Budget
There's a good chance you know exactly who's part of your recruiting team. Either you're finally fully staffed or you've been decimated over the course of a few months - or, more likely, somewhere in between. But putting this detail in spreadsheet form can be a really powerful tool to show executives and other key decision-makers exactly how your team has changed between January 2016 and December 2016. Use this information to proudly show how far you've come, or use it to make it abundantly clear what your needs are. We've also included a sheet that tracks salaries, bonuses, benefits, etc. for the recruiting team, which can help make your case for carving out a budget for 2017.
Recruiting Programs Budget
One of the best ways to continue commanding budget allocations from senior management is to show exactly where you're using the money, and demonstrate correlating success. By tracking what you spent on job advertising, employee referral bonus program, recruiting agency, employer branding, recruiting events, etc., by quarter over the course of last year, you can leverage this information to make a case for an equal or greater budget going forward.
Recruiting Systems, Before & After
Applicant tracking systems have become essential tools for recruiting, but are you looking closely at which one and why? If you've switched software in the past year, it's important to analyze how that shift affected your recruiting. We've included a spreadsheet that shows what changed and when, which you can extrapolate on for links to outcomes, whether positive or negative.
Entering your data into this pre-programmed spreadsheet will give you a really powerful tool for assessing exactly where you spent your recruiting budget last year - information you can leverage to build out a strategic budget for 2017. You'll also be able to plan ahead for predictable hiring surges and where you should be posting the corresponding job openings to draw the best talent. Making a nominal time investment now - just an hour or two before lunch - will set you up for a year of success. Here's to a great 2017!
