Online recruitment - a valid solution for the SME?
Research indicates that recruitment can take up to 20% of a manager's day* Writing advertisements, placing them in newspapers, waiting for hours on the phone to newspapers…it takes a significant amount of time. Giles Bretherton, owner of a small catering company in Leeds, said: "When we're recruiting it adds hours to my day. All the small business owners I know work more than ten hours a day - so having to organise advertising on top of that really becomes exhausting."
And it's not only time consuming - recruiting can be expensive, especially when you're competing for the best talent against larger companies. Often SMEs need to place advertisements in national newspapers and, although costs vary depending on the publication, position, date, repeat deals and section of the paper, it's not out of the question to spend £6,000 on a single advertisement that runs for just one day.
Using a recruitment consultancy is also expensive, the cost to the SME is around 20% of the advertised salary - a considerable amount of money, especially for SMEs.
SMEs also encounter problems because they lack brand recognition, so letters of enquiry are not as common as they may be for companies with high profiles. Where a company like Goldman Sachs, Lloyds or John Lewis might get hundreds of letters a week from people enquiring about vacancies, an SME is unlikely to get one.
