How To Build An Effective Recruiting Budget For 2022

Ask any frontline recruiter and they’ll tell you tired, traditional investment in recruitment channels is completely ineffective. This hasn’t necessarily just been driven by more recent changes to work, but more that there is still a gulf between those who feel the industry can rely on tried and tested ways of working, and the reality on the ground. 

The real story of modern recruitment budgeting is one of trust, and agility - building trust, retaining it, effectively using it, and creating cultures of advocacy with trust at its core. Using this trust and the space it gives you creates agile recruitment strategies that find the right talent, quickly, and crucially engages them through the channels they reside. 

Plus, building a budget in the era of the Great Resignation is incredibly difficult - with so much talent turnover in some of our major industrial sectors, employers are trying to build budgets that value and prioritize retention, as much as finding new hires.

This takes targeted investment, with contemporary analysis at its heart. 

Analysis is key

Building an effective, modern recruitment budget takes analysis. 

First and foremost, decision-makers building a budget need to put financial agility as the foundation of any business spend: if the coronavirus has taught anyone anything, it’s that the most well-laid plans can be completely hamstrung by an outlier event. 

What’s more important to financial and business stability, now, is how you can pivot your budget to create consistent recruitment decisions within and beyond a crisis, that fit the needs of your recruitment audience. 

The old and the new

The recruitment industry is in completely unknown territory, although employers are rapidly changing their models in light of huge changes wrought by COVID-19. Never before in modern history have we had such unprecedented employee churn. We have never had as many unfilled vacancies. 4 million people quit their jobs in April of 2021, and more and more people are holding employers’ feet to the fire in regards to ESG, social justice, and their company purpose. 

These are not trends, per se - this is long-term, generational change, and as we move into a post-pandemic environment it’s important any recruitment budget is set according to these new rules.

Good recruitment practice means taking stock of these changes. Here is how you build a recruitment budget ready for 2022: focus on the two most important agile parts of the recruitment matrix - candidate communication, and employer branding. 

Agile candidate communication 

We live in the era of the candidate market. There are more jobs being advertised than talent available to fill the jobs, especially in some key markets, putting upward pressure on salaries and downward pressure on recruiters to fill much-needed roles. 

This is not for want of there being a lack of talent, exactly. It’s down to expectation management and contemporary career-building amid a crisis. In the main, the coronavirus has upended employee expectations in regards to everything from remote work, to commuter culture, health and safety, time spent at home, and the role of the state in guaranteeing livelihoods and competitive salaries. Some industries were also put under enormous pressure, increasing burnout and decimating retention rates. 

But there is a way through the employment fog - rebuilt, effective candidate communications. 

This means investing heavily in your marketing channels, making sure your employment opportunities are not only well advertised (and, crucially, well written), but engaging. This means using novel marketing methods to attract candidates. This means speeding up your recruitment process. This means investing in “personal brand” training for your consultants. This means, if needed, completely rebranding your agency or in-house team to better attract hybrid or remote workers. This means using every available channel to speak to, sell to and engage your candidate on why you’re such a good employer. 

In essence, it means retrofitting your entire “sales” output to be more empathetic, more patient, more human and less focused on KPIs. It means being realistic as to what people actually want from their employer.

Employer Branding

Employer branding is your secret hiring weapon: it means using your company personality and company purpose as the primary focus of your recruitment outreach. 

There are some fantastic examples of employer branding being an incredibly effective talent magnet, and some agencies specialize in creating attractive, engaging employer branding videos as a primary tool to draw candidates to their clients.

Employer branding sets your company purpose and personality as paramount in your recruitment mix. As students of recruitment know, brand purpose has become integral to recruitment: people want to work for companies with meaning, and enterprises who value (and communicate) their ESG credentials. People want to work for more diverse teams. People want to work for more than a profit line.

This is why employer branding is so important - it brings talent to you by nature of your purpose. 

This is the nature of budget forecasting in 2022 and beyond: it’s not only prediction and analysis of ROI and cost-effectiveness - it’s understanding spending through the lens of how effective your communications are, and how meaningful and well communicated your employer branding is. 

These are the two most important tools for your recruitment consultants, so invest in them!