It’s 2015 planning time. It’s time to figure out your 2015 recruiting goals, strategies and tactics. It’s also time to nail down what budget and resources you need to hit those goals. And of course, you aren’t done until you’ve convinced your boss that your budget requests are reasonable!
One thing that I’ve always done in my career is to ask peers at other companies if they are comfortable sharing their budget spreadsheets and key strategies for the next year in a hope to understand:
- How their spend level correlates to the goals they are expected to achieve (e.g. # of hires, types of hires, cost per hire, # of hires per recruiter, % growth vs. previous year)
- If they are spending on new, innovative ideas or tools that I hadn’t yet considered
- How they allocate their spend between people, systems, programmes
- How they organise and track the budget categories
Many times these peers are unable to share their documents outside their company. Sometimes, the best they can do is to share the shell of their budget planning spreadsheet, but zero out the line items. It’s a reasonable compromise.
The result, however, is that it is common to go into budget planning with just your own historical data and planning models, and realise after the fact that youmay have missed some opportunities. When we started ramping our recruiting effort this year, I spent a few hours searching Google and Slideshare to see if anyone had shared their budget frameworks, but came up empty-handed. It’s a bummer when you miss something in planning and have to wait another whole year to invest in a high-impact programme that your peers are already doing.
Thus, I decided to share Glassdoor’s internal recruiting budget with you. If you run recruiting for a massive company, it probably won’t help you much and you may find it “cute.” But, in case you run recruiting for a rapidly growing small company with similar challenges, I hope it may help you both with your planning as well as help you with developing a compelling case with your boss for sufficient budget to hit your 2015 objectives.
By sharing this info, you may be able to poke holes in our budget allocation, tool selection and planning process - that’s ok with us - if there is a better way, we want to know.
A little context first on how we arrived at our 2014 recruiting budget.
Challenge #1: We needed to hire more than 200 people. And we had both high-volume and hard-to-fill positions.
We needed to hire roughly 50 software engineers, product managers, data scientists, and UI designers. These are typically the hardest-to-fill and most competitive positions in the SF bay area.
We needed to hire a CFO, Chief People Officer, and several sales leaders. These talented folks are also not easy to find.
All the while, we needed to scale our Glassdoor for Employers business and hire over 120 sales, marketing and service pros; the sheer volume of hiring was daunting.
Below is what we needed to accomplish, and so far we are on track!
Challenge #2: 2014 was a building year for Glassdoor’s Recruiting team.
In prior years, Glassdoor had relied on small number of contract recruiters and thirdparty contingent search firms to assist the hiring managers. But given the constant hiring volume expected for 2014, we concluded that the best thing to do was bring on full-time recruiters for key job categories like Engineering, Sales, and G&A. We needed sourcers to support the recruiters and we needed recruiting operations folks to fine-tune our systems and processes. We needed to “walk the walk” and deliver a great candidate experience and hire a rockstar for Employer Branding to showcase our vibrant employer brand. We weren’t starting from scratch, but we had big, audacious goals and a huge amount of hiring to do each month. Thus, we had to build our foundation and deliver results to the hiring managers at the same time.
The Talent Acquisition Team – Before and After:
From a budget perspective, here is how our resourcing plan for Recruiting team resulted in “fully burdened” personnel costs. As we built out our internal team between February and October, you will see that the investment in personnel costs did grow substantially from Q1 to Q4.
Challenge #3: It had to happen fast. We didn’t have the luxury to first build our team and systems for a few months before starting hiring. We needed to build and execute. Thus, we needed amplify our brand and turn on all promising recruiting channels.
We needed a high quality candidate pipeline… and fast. We needed employee referrals, active candidates, passive candidates, re-lo candidates, pink unicorns - we needed them all. We needed some programmes that were “always on” – filling our candidate pipeline. We needed to let the world know that we had a lot of openings. We tested a bunch of different sources to see what would work best. We’re fortunate to be able to advertise all our jobs for free on our own site and it is our number one source of hire. Full disclosure: to tap into different talent pools, we also post some of our jobs on LinkedIn, Indeed, craigslist and niche job boards. We test a variety of things - some work, some don’t. Our goal is always to increase our investment in the things that work, and turn off those with a weak ROI.
As recruiters and hiring managers, we are also fortunate to have an amazing company culture. But, we needed to go further to amplify its impact. Post interview, we would hear from candidates that they loved the energy and vibe of the office environment and for the first time had been convinced that working north of the Golden Gate Bridge was a good idea. We thought to ourselves “if we can only get them to come into our office, they’ll see how great the culture is and want to join us.” So, we needed to have candidates’ “first moment of truth” and initial impression of Glassdoor to accelerate to the moment when they first become aware of our opening. We needed to invest in our employer brand and start sharing the inside scoop of what exactly it felt like to work at Glassdoor. For groups like Engineering and Sales, we decided to tailor the message via videos to better resonate with the target audience. There was a bunch we needed to do to achieve this, and it took a concentrated effort and investment. It wasn’t going to happen on its own.
Note: in this budget, we included the cost of advertising on Glassdoor to give a fair depiction of a normal cost-per-hire (CPH).
As a result of those programme investments, here are our “Source of Hire” metrics. You’ll see that Job Advertising and Employee Referral Programmes have been highly cost-efficient and have been strong contributors to our hiring results. For small, growing companies whose relative awareness with job seekers is minimal vs household names like Google and Facebook, it makes a great deal of sense to raise your awareness by promoting both your employer brand and jobs.
There was a great deal of hustle required by all of the hiring managers as well as our growing recruiting team. When it came to Sales hiring, we knew that a delay in the start of any Sales hiring class would have an adverse affect on our top line revenue for 2014. We couldn’t let that happen. Our sales managers and sales recruiters wouldn’t let it happen and moved mountains to hit our hiring goals. In addition to tightly managing our sales candidate pipeline, we also added some sales recruiting events to create a spike in candidate flow. In general, the strategies worked and we are pretty happy with our time-to-hire. See our time-to-fill by department below.
Challenge #4: Candidate use of mobile devices was taking off. Each month our mobile traffic was growing by 2% and eventually surpassed 50%.
We needed to invest in our recruiting systems to make our recruiting team as productive as possible. We wanted candidates coming from mobile devices to have a good experience and be able to apply for jobs with as little friction as possible. We wanted them to be able to read our employer branding content from any mobile device without having to “pinch and zoom.” We wanted all the candidate flow we could get and didn’t want 50% of our candidates to face a roadblock in the apply process. We implemented both a mobile optimised career site and “mobile apply” in mid-2014 to improve the candidate experience and applicant flow.
To help our sourcers, we also invested in a new breed of sourcing tools like Connectifier and extended our investment in the Jobvite platform by purchasing their CRM/Engage product.
Challenge #5: Glassdoor’s HQ is in a beautiful waterfront location just north of San Francisco, but if you live in the South San Jose, it won’t be your “dream commute.”
To hit our hiring goals, we needed to increase our addressable talent pool and needed SF/North Bay residents to know that Glassdoor is an up-and-coming employer that is close to home!
The good news is that Glassdoor is an amazing place to work. Our office environment is phenomenal and directly on the water in Sausalito. If you live in the SF bay area, it’s those two blue-roofed buildings on the water when you get off the Stinson Beach/Muir Woods exit on 101. It’s a dream commute if you live in the North Bay or in Pacific Heights/Marina. However, one of the recruiting challenges is that Sausalito isn’t exactly convenient if you are a software engineer in San Jose.
To help us attract talent, our Facilities team was able to get permission from our building to add a Glassdoor sign to the front of our building. Because we are right next to 101 freeway, candidates who commute to downtown SF and drive right by our office everyday will see our sign and should begin to consider Glassdoor. Our recruiting team also came up with a guerilla marketing tactic – they setup a free “coffee cart” next to the park-n-ride bus stop across from our building that takes commuters into SF.
Our engineers came up with another great idea to expand our talent pool outside the highly competitive SF Bay Area. They came up with a way to allow our jobs to show up in job search results for other cities in the USA. See the example below. They also set up our jobs to highlight to job seekers on Glassdoor that relocation assistance was provided for certain jobs. This allowed us to tap into talent pools all across the country. Note: Because this was part of our strategy, we did include candidate travel and relocation costs in our overall budget.
Summary 2014 Recruiting Budget & Goals:
All in all, it wasn’t an easy task, but with the total budget of £1.1M, we were able to hit our hiring goals and scale our Recruiting operations. While companies outside the SF Bay Area may look at a £4,600 CPH and not be impressed at all, it is a good target to shoot for if you are a startup in hyper-growth mode that is recruiting “hard-to-fill” positions. Do you want to learnmore about building a recruiting budget? Watch our webinar,How We Built our 2014 Budget.
I hope this information about our budget, team size, and recruiting tools is useful. If you have comments (or suggestions), feel free to contact me at steve.roop@glassdoor.com. Want the full Excel document? Download the full 2015 Recruiting Budget Template for Small & Mid-Sized Businesses now! It will help you set hiring goals, organise and track budget categories and model potential spending plan efforts.
I’d love to see others share their format and categories of their budget with the larger community as well. If you are willing to share it on the Glassdoor blog, please let me know and we’ll help you format the blog post.
