As businesses find themselves in new territory during this year’s pandemic, looking ahead and trying to gauge next year’s hiring landscape can be daunting. Recruitment budget planning amid uncertainty means you need to invest in solutions that will allow for flexibility and offer efficiency gains that don’t break the bank—and these solutions should also be time-tested, not trendy. You’ll want to find budget-friendly ways to boost your hiring, while also streamlining your process to keep next year’s recruitment budget in check. Let’s take a look at how.

Offer Cost-Effective Benefits

Remote work options and flex time can be cost-effective perks to offer employees and new hires. Whether an employee works 9–5 or chooses their own timeframe does not create a significant change in the cost to employ your workforce—and benefits like this may be at the forefront of candidate’s minds post-pandemic. We’ve undergone a cultural shift this year, with many offices running at reduced capacities and many employees accustomed to the idea of working from home. The sudden changes we have had to make to be safe may prove to have lasting effects on how businesses operate and how they attract top talent.

Offering training opportunities and skill-building workshops are other cost-effective benefits that double as investments in enhancing your workforce. Such perks can increase employee engagement and attract new hires looking for a position at a company that can offer career advancement opportunities.

Look Within

Hiring from within can be a boon to your organization because any vacancy can target a quality pool of applicants at no cost at all. In essence, the quality candidates from within your organization are known quantities. When you have access to performance reviews and first-hand knowledge of an employee’s experience, you can also assess fit for a new vacancy with ease, which saves time and money. This practice has the effect of improving employee engagement by offering employees career advancement opportunities within your organization. While this can seem like shuffling the decks, filling one vacancy only to leave another, it is easier to fill entry-level positions and build the necessary skills of entry-level employees than to hire for vacancies requiring specialized skills.

Another way to engage the resource of your workforce is through an employee referral program. Again, past and current employees who know the company best may also know candidates who are perfect for your next vacancy—which is why using referrals is a time-tested sourcing strategy.

Invest In The Right Tech

Tech should streamline your hiring while offering a return on investment. In HR, tech solutions abound for every aspect of the process, but you don’t need more and more tech—you just need the right tech that can help boost your hiring. AI tech is twofold. First, it can simplify many aspects of the hiring process through automating tasks and taking on the busywork of HR. Second, and perhaps the best boost you can get, comes at the very beginning of your hiring process in the form of job ad tech. Not only is the job ad a big chunk of your recruitment budget, having an effective and efficient job ad campaign can start the entire process on the right foot.

A programmatic job ad platform like Pandologic’s pandoIQ offers a solution that maximizes campaign dollars and provides the efficiency you need to hire quality candidates quickly. When AI can target quality candidates where they search on the internet, monitor job ad performance, and allocate your recruitment budget across multiple job ad campaigns, the entire process becomes more efficient, more cost-effective, and smarter because it is all based on data. Programmatic can offer a return on investment across years—not simply next year’s recruitment budget. So as you plan for the future of your hiring, you can’t simply look at cost-cutting measures, but should also seek out where you can invest smartly to save costs over the long haul.

Explore Recruitment Marketing

Your brand and your company website should go hand in hand. Candidates should be able to find your website quickly to have access to company information and vacancies, and it should also clearly indicate what it is like to work at the company and share the culture of your organization. Maintaining a social media presence is a low-cost way to engage potential employees and potential clients or customers, and can further enhance your web presence and increase traffic to your careers page. As you plan ahead, make sure you are investing time in engaging the public that can make gains in the future.