Here we go again! It’s Monday morning, just before lunch. You’ve just come out of a strategy meeting where your leadership announced that your team will again be growing this year. 100 new employees in the next 6 months! How is our HR department, consisting of only three people (you included!), going to pull this one, with a limited budget and so many other things on your plate? Questions like these go through your mind as you’re heading towards the canteen. 

Yup, hiring can be very time-consuming - and costly! The Society for Human Resource Management estimates that companies in the United States (US) spend an average of $4,129 per job. Not surprisingly, when searching for people to fill in management and leadership roles this amount is even higher.

To put things into perspective, for a people count of 100 new employees, and 10 of them being in some sort of senior positions, this can mean that your company might easily spend more than €420,000 on hiring activities and resources alone!  

That’s surely a lot of money spent on finding new talent (and we’re not even touching upon the cost of mishire!). According to some estimations, nearly €75 billion are allocated to various recruitment staff, products, and services in the US. Globally, companies are likely to spend three times more. 

But it is not only the high financial costs that present a problem to hiring teams, potentially threatening the business of the entire company. 

We all know that hours invested in talent search and recruitment, such as conducting interviews with potential candidates to see whether they are the right fit for the organization, are beyond precious. 

The data from Glassdoor suggest that companies nowadays spend double the amount of time interviewing candidates that they used to some years ago. 

“Seriously?! How come finding talent has become so difficult?”, you may ask.  

One of the problems might lie in the fact that companies focus too much on the outside hires, instead of considering to promote (or offer a different career track) to their current employees first. 

You will not be surprised to hear that the outside search and onboarding can prolong the time when a job actually gets done. Research suggests that newbies can spend up to three years to reach the level of performance of employees who have been with the company for a longer time period. Wow. 

So next time you’re overwhelmed with the number of people that you’ve been asked to bring into your organization, think about what skills and experiences your existing team members have to offer to (help) fill those positions.  

You might be surprised to realize how many of your current employees would actually welcome the opportunity to grow within the organization, whether responsibility-wise or by receiving a new title that might shift their career into a completely unknown, yet exciting new direction.   

As noted by Deloitte in its Global Human Capital Trends report from 2019, “Organizations can no longer expect to source and hire enough people with all the capabilities they need; they must move and develop people internally to be able to thrive.”

We couldn’t agree more. It’s all about creating a working environment where every employee can thrive.

A deeper understanding of how people feel about the opportunities to develop and grow in the workplace might be just the first step to ensure that you’re on the right path of making your hiring process a bit less painful. 

Learn how Valuebeat helps identify what employees and candidates need to thrive