Claire Grove, marketing manager, Taleo UK

I am typing this blog entry after a busy first day exhibiting at the CIPD Annual Conference.  It’s been an interesting day on the Taleo stand meeting lots of people across the industry, and though there are several themes emerging from the conversations we’ve had, the main one is around the economic climate and its effect on HR.

I’ve been asked if as a company we’re suffering from the credit crunch, and given the recent bad news about the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the financial challenges facing organisations as a whole, it’s understandable to assume we might be; after all HR must surely be cutting costs….mustn’t they?

Well this is true, but – perhaps luckily for us - this doesn’t seem to mean a complete blanket ban on expenditure.  The common theme I’m seeing, especially from the CIPD event, is that HR seems to be working smarter in making cost savings and focusing on their ROI.  Companies are looking at their hiring processes and mobility costs, and looking to see what changes they can implement internally to drive down cost and maximise performance.

One way organisations are doing this is to look at their costs relating to talent acquisition. There are some good opportunities for reducing overall cost around the hiring process, including:

• Using automation to reduce the time HR staff and hiring managers spend on activities such as requisition management, sourcing, screening and assessment.

• Consistent objective pre-screening methods to reduce the administrative burden of narrowing down a candidate shortlist.

• Promoting the use of technology to drive internal mobility in organisations, which reduces costs, increases staff satisfaction and improves retention rates.

• Strong business intelligence to enable strategic management of any metrics which an organisation needs to measure.

By automating and streamlining these processes, HR managers are cutting time and costs and increasing their own efficiency. Many are delving deeper into their recruitment processes to sanity check spend versus actual impact to the organisation. To use a real-life example, one of our customers spent heavily on advertising positions on a well-know job board. Once they started reporting and analysing their methods in more detail, they found that although they attracted the largest number of applicants through this source, they subsequently hired very few people this way. Most effective for them was their employee referral scheme, where they had a tiny proportion of applicants in comparison but the hire rate was much more effective and cost of hire was in fact very low.

This type of information makes it far easier to establish what’s working and what’s not, to adapt the talent acquisition process and increase ROI. Kevin Oakes, CEO at the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), states that: “The talent managers that are showing some kind of ROI to top-level management, those are the ones that are going to rise to the top.”

Certainly food for thought!