Should healthcare recruiters pay heed to cost per hire?

 

Recruitment and selection processes are getting upgraded as recruiters realize the need for a more streamlined approach. In search of suitable candidates, recruiters look out for different ways to strategize a robust hiring plan. Gone are the days when HR professionals followed the traditional approach to onboard candidates. Since recruiters have become more accepting of disruptive HR technologies, the recruitment and selection process is experiencing a major overhaul. Today, HR technologies involve the application of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data. Now, amidst such technological disruption in recruitment, how important is cost per hire? And how much should a healthcare recruiter care about it?

 

The healthcare industry is seeking the help of HR technology to find the best in class and the most niche healthcare professionals. As healthcare professionals are entrusted with saving people’s lives, making a wrong hire can cost more than just money. Therefore, recruiters need to identify the exact and most significant metrics that they should measure when hiring candidates.

 

Here are a few key recruitment metrics that every healthcare recruiter must have on his recruitment dashboard:

 

• Competitor analysis: A healthcare recruiter must be able to compare his recruitment statistics with that of his competitors. Comparing statistics gives recruiters insights on what positions their competitors are looking to fill, the effectiveness of their campaigns with respect to their competitor’s, and turns competitors into knowledge bases.
• Hiring potential: Such a metric helps healthcare recruiters to gauge the level of difficulty he will face in finding a candidate with the given skill set and location preference. With Talismatic, a recruiter gets to know whether it is easy, moderate, or difficult to get the desired candidate in the city of search, in a matter of seconds!
• Job closing time: A healthcare recruiter can take help of such a metric to estimate how long it will take him to close a particular vacancy. This will help the recruiter in pipelining candidates for positions that generally take longer than usual to fill.
• Salary trends: It is important for a healthcare recruiter to have an idea about the current salary trends in the industry. This way, recruiters won’t end up missing out on quality recruits simply because they weren’t paying enough. Similarly, recruiters won’t end up paying more than required for a particular position, as well.

 

Now coming to how important is cost per hire.

 

Cost per hire: the pros

 

It is of utmost importance for businesses to find the right talent within the stipulated recruitment budget. Spending too much and too less can both be a big issue prove adverse in different ways. Calculating cost per hire is easy and helps a recruiter to keep track of the cost entailed right from broadcasting a vacancy to training the selected candidate. As a result, calculating the cost per hire gives the recruiter a comprehensive view of how to spend the budget. A reliable estimate of cost per hire can help a recruiter make smarter investment decisions, saving the organization’s resources. Furthermore, regularly examining cost per hire will help recruiters judge which investments can yield better results at the end of a recruitment campaign.

 

Cost per hire: the cons

 

Like we mentioned before, the recruitment landscape is fast changing. As a result, the cost per hire metric is gradually taking the back seat. More modern and state-of-the-art recruitment metrics are coming to the forefront, minimizing, if not eradicating, the role of cost per hire. This is because:

 

• Cost of hire forces a recruiter to think more like an accountant and less like a recruiting leader. The recruiter’s focus shifts towards cost reduction and away from the quality of hire.
• Cheap hiring campaigns may drive away the best candidates. Besides, overemphasis on the cost of hiring may sometimes lead to a rather slow hiring process. This will paradoxically make the recruitment process more expensive than cheap.
• As recruiters improve their strategies based on past experiences, cost per hire may vary across your competing organizations. Therefore, cost per hire cannot be used as a substantial metric if you’re creating a strategy that’s competitive.

 

Cost per hire is a misleading metric. Though it helps a recruiter to keep track of all hiring costs, it distracts the recruiter from his actual job of hiring potential candidates. Return on investments (ROI) is the metric that should be used instead. ROI helps in both tracking the cost per her and assuring quality recruitment.

 

Cost per hire forces recruiters to keep cost before quality. In the field of healthcare, such an approach can be quite dangerous. You’re hiring candidates who’ll deal with lives. Cost per hire cannot dominate the quality of your recruitment. There are better ways to control the budget of recruitment than sticking to cost per hire. For instance, using recruitment software like Talismatic that saves your time and money by showcasing all the important metrics in a single dashboard. A healthcare recruiter can, therefore, easily access all the relevant metrics with a single click.

 

Talismatic aids recruiters in their study of recruitment metrics through intuitive graphical representations and heat maps.  Furthermore, Talismatic’s features like candidate spotter, geo-intelligence, competitor benchmarking, and recruiting sources summarize all the important trends that a healthcare recruiter should care about.