Are you game planning for revenue growth in the upcoming year?  Working with Sales and Marketing to drive new clients in the first quarter?  The highest growth ROI isn’t in an ad campaign, it resides in Human Resource with preventative recruiting.

Lost opportunity, due to understaffing, is the largest drag on profit in any business.  Every day your company is short a client facing employee hundreds of dollars in profit is lost.  Taking a month to fill a sales role, when you start the search short the person, can result in between $15,000 and $30,000 in unrealized profit.  Now consider being a few sales reps short?  You can easily be throwing away six figures worth of profit each month.

Most managers only consider the cost of recruiting and time invested in screening.  With all the cost effective options available to market a job, this is a drop in the bucket against the real money at stake.  Recruiting prior to feeling the pain of need is the key boosting results.

Preventative recruiting is planning ahead of sales by 3 to 6 months.  Advertise in anticipation of the next two quarters.  Build a pipeline of qualified candidates ready to step in immediately, and cultivate future candidates that are only starting to consider a new position.  A typical new sales rep takes 90 days to fully understand your business’ process and product.  Be ready to hire for March now, and target later candidates to fill in for June.

Here are just a few of the benefits of preventative recruiting:

1. Less time pressure means more time to interview and vet candidates, resulting in better hires.
2. Advertising during off-peak sales periods gets higher quality applicants, because there are fewer competitors for job seekers.
3. Having candidates in a pipeline reduces time to hire, speeding up production.
4. Consistent advertising has an employer branding effect.  This allows you to reach presently employed passive job seekers prior to them actually getting in the job market.
5. Never get caught understaffed losing thousands a month.

As you meet with your team about 2018, get your hiring plan in gear.  Have an employment advertising plan, and a commitment to consistently interview candidates even if you aren’t prepared to hire them on today (though keep an open mind).  If you are the Manager that places a job ad when you notice customers aren’t being helped, you already are losing out.

Happy hunting for your next star.  Contact us for more questions on building a consistent ad plan on a budget, no cost and no obligation.