One of the ironic things about our industry is that even though recruiters are tasked with solving the #1 problem that keeps CEO’s up at night (spoiler alert: hiring talent!), the needs of recruiting teams are often overlooked when it comes to budget allocation. As a result, many recruitment teams are operating on ‘shoestring’ budgets and often can’t afford the tools and technology they need to do their job effectively. The same can also be said for many staffing agency recruiters and independent recruiters who don’t have access to large budgets but are still expected to deliver strong results for their clients.

The good news is that with a bit of creativity and a can-do attitude, there are many ways to stretch your dollars so you can achieve more recruitment success on a shoestring budget:

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Maximize your social media presence

Social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are also useful for nurturing professional relationships and networking - and best of all: they’re free! Treat them like a marketing platform for your candidates and use them to optimize your engagement by sharing anecdotes and interesting information and articles to your followers. At Keeyora we use a free social media management platform called Buffer to help us keep on top of our social media presence.

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Leverage organic SEO

Modern recruitment teams need to adopt a marketing mindset to compete in today’s tight labor market. Google for jobs has helped to level the field by displaying relevant search results based on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of job adds (instead of sponsored ads via Indeed) which means you can improve your job posting visibility by employing some basic SEO best practices. SEO is both an art and a science but there are some free tools out there that can really help - at Keeyora we use Screaming Frog and Google PageSpeed Insights to help improve our SEO performance.

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Explore the new wave of recruitment tools (with free trials!)

You might be surprised how affordable good recruitment tech has become. Recent developments in cloud technology and software programming has made software cheaper and faster to build which has lead to a burst of new and exciting recruitment tools hitting the market. This new era of web-based recruitment technology has made good recruitment tech a lot more affordable and accessible than it used to be - and most vendors will offer a free trial which is a great way to test out which technology works best for your needs. For example, we designed Keeyora to be uber-accessible to teams with small budgets by offering a first-in-industry Pay As You Go Plan, or a flexible Monthly Plan (and not to mention - a free trial!).

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Bonus thought

When it comes to recruitment technology, one size rarely 'fits all' because not everyone in a recruitment team has the same needs. For example, does everyone on your team need a LinkedIn Recruiter account? Maybe someone just needs Recruiter Lite and you could use this money for something else. Try experimenting with different recruitment tech with individuals in your team and evaluate them after a few months to see if it’s something the whole team would benefit from (that way you’ll be making informed decisions based on ROI). We are big fans of doing a ‘Tech Tuesday’ where you try to demo new tech once a week, or have a team member present some new tech they found.

Since day one our mission is for recruiters to have the best technology regardless of their budget, so what are your creative ideas to stretch your dollar?

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