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Article: why recruitment is an essential strategic function

Before embarking on an analysis of why recruitment is strategic, it's important to define strategic. In the context of recruitment, strategic functions are those which:
  • Have an effect or impact across all business areas
  • Impact both product development and customer satisfaction
  • Have a significant impact on profitability
If your company has an annual employee 'churn rate' (percentage of employees leaving the business) of 20%, and all of your replacement hires are mediocre employees who are less productive than their predecessors, it will only take 5 years for your entire company to be mediocre. The cost of a 'bad hire' for a software engineer can exceed a million pounds and hiring a bad CEO can lead to losses running into billions of pounds.

Michael Wright, Idealpeople's Managing Director comments; "We are experts in the business of recruitment and selection at all levels in an organisation from the helpdesk to the boardroom table. Whilst we know of businesses which pride themselves on 'insourcing' such a business critical function to avoid recruitment agency costs, the benefits of working with external staffing providers are significant and seriously diminish the chances of making bad hires"

"Our figures speak for themselves. Out of the last 100 people we placed with our customers, just three left within the three month rebate period. Assuming that most employers we work with would not keep staff beyond the traditional 12 week contractual trial period were they not happy, we can assume that 97% of the individuals placed by us in permanent jobs were considered to be 'good hires'"

"If you fail in the recruitment and selection of great people, you won't have great employees. And without great employees how can you possibly have a great company?"

No one purposely hires mediocre applicants, but weak, localised recruitment efforts, using bad recruitment agencies or headhunters or using insubstantial recruitment tools will result in the hiring of mediocre employees. Everyone hires some mediocre employees, but reliance on 'over busy' managers or hr departments to conduct effective end to end recruitment campaigns without the aid of skilled external agencies or headhunters will result in a greater proportion of 'bad' hires than 'world class' ones.



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