According to Jim Collins, author of the best-selling Good to Great, "Performing business leaders don't think in terms of 'what' or 'how much,' but in terms of 'who'".

In other words, the company must be concerned first with attracting quality profiles, the famous " talents " of which we have talked about at the #rmsconf in 2017,before we knew what specific positions to give them.

This way of thinking is a small revolution that the Inbound Recruiting is part of.

Inbound Recruiting is now widely recognized as an effective method for reaching passive candidates. 

This strategy is also far more cost-effective when you are looking to attract rare profiles on a recurring basis. 

By investing in quality content today, you capitalize on the long term 

You lower your hiring costs

Instead of spending money on ineffective ads and other "push" marketing methods to attract new candidates, you invest in content that will bring them to your career site. 

Mechanically, this reduces your external recruiting costs - for example, recruitment agency fees, professional advertising, participation in job fairs or similar events.

By creating a talent pipeline, you can reach out to truly engaged candidates more easily and effectively.

You increase your value by having the right people

As the saying goes: an excellent team with a mediocre idea will always do better than a mediocre team with an excellent idea.

This is why it is imperative for a company that wants to ensure its sustainability to have the best people.

The latter, more committed, more motivated, will be more capable of producing value, of accepting training to accompany the evolution of their profession, of staying for a long time within your organization and letting you benefit from their know-how, etc.

To go further on this topic, I invite you to read this excellent study by Alex Edmans entitled "The link between job satisfaction and firm value, with implications for corporate social responsibility".

You increase revenue generated from marketing activities 

About 70% of people who are looking for a job, either actively or passively, begin their search via Google.

So it's essential that your content be shared as widely as possible to make the most impact. Your employees can help by becoming employer brand ambassadors.

The benefit of this broad outreach is that your online presence positively affects not only your talent-acquisition pipeline, but also your sales - albeit indirectly.

In effect, you could say that everything your company does is related to sales, marketing and recruiting in some way.

By doing the math, you will save a heck of a lot of money on talent acquisition with Inbound Recruiting!  

Measuring the ROI of Inbound Recruiting

If you want to be sure of the positive financial value resulting from Inbound Recruiting, you can simply measure it.

For example, knowing that one of the most important key performance indicators (cost per contract) is calculated by dividing all costs by the number of hires, you can easily calculate this ratio before and after implementing an Inbound Recruiting strategy.

To do this, start by adding up all the external and internal costs listed below. These are the costs incurred when you are not using Inbound Recruiting:

External costs(all external expenses for recruitment within a given time frame)

• Third party fees, such as sourcing agencies
.
• Advertising costs
• The recruitment costs of the job fair 
• Recruitment travel costs
• External assessments, background checks, etc.

Internal costs(all internal expenses for recruitment within the given timeframe)

• Compensation and benefits for a portion of the recruiting team
• The costs of the talent acquisition system - hardware and software
• The other fixed costs

After summarizing all the costs, let's say you end up with a total of €250,000. Divide that number by your number of hires - say 45 - and you'll arrive at your cost per contract, which is about €5,550 in this example.

Now it's time to evaluate your cost per contract using an Inbound Recruiting methodology.

You'll still need most of your team of recruiters and probably a few job board contracts, but you'll save a hell of a lot of money on acquisition. 

If the hires you need to make correspond to three Candidate Personas, the cost of your campaigns shouldn't exceed €100,000 - a savings of nearly €150,000 in total. Per contract, this will set you back €2200 or a savings of almost 100%. That's significant!

This simple example shows quite clearly the savings associated with Inbound Recruiting.

A multi-impact investment

If you're wondering if your internal costs are increased with the use of Inbound Recruiting, they are not.

With this methodology, you will likely invest some time analyzing your talent network, updating it, and maintaining your candidate data storage system.

This time may be comparable to (or even less than) the time you would spend with the "push" recruiting method and actively seeking new hires (creating the job description, collecting all applications, analyzing, cold approaching candidates and making decisions).

Here are some other things to consider when analyzing the impact of Inbound Recruiting:

• By providing information to your candidates up front, you guard against a high risk of turnover. Indeed, by identifying a point of discomfort for candidates, you can explain it or even turn it into an advantage to convince.
• To the extent that you identify your candidates upstream on the basis of their involvement, you avoid inherent biases in applications, or even discrimination.
• The quality of your content will be perceived positively by your current employees, which strengthens the employee experience.

Would Inbound Recruiting be the magic bullet for recruiting?

Of course not, but it is becoming increasingly clear that it is an effective and efficient tool to add to the modern recruiter's toolbox!