The Cost of Unfilled Tech Jobs
According to research from Glassdoor, the value of the near 300,000 unfilled IT jobs posted by American companies costs nearly $20.1 billion dollars. The cost to individual businesses varies, but those costs are always significant. American businesses try a host of strategies to recruit tech professionals, but most still struggle in today’s market. Fortunately, there is a cost-effective solution that can make a real difference. A niche staffing firm that specializes in IT and tech recruiting can help you reduce your costs while simultaneously improving productivity, morale, and retention.
Unfilled Tech Jobs Lead to Rushed (And Often Bad) Hires
When a tech position goes unfilled for a long time, it’s tempting to just settle for a warm body. However, a single bad hire can cost anywhere from two to seven times the employee’s salary. A staffing partner goes the extra mile to ensure strong matches both from a skills perspective and a cultural perspective, reducing the chance of making a bad hire without adding strain on your internal team. To further reduce risk, staffing firms provide options like contract-to-hire, allowing you to “test” a potential full-time candidate without incurring the cost or risk of hiring them directly on day one.
Variable Labor Costs Can Wreck The Bottom Line
Labor is almost always the biggest line item on a company’s P&L statement, and tech positions eat up a lot of that budget as IT salaries continue to climb. Labor costs can fluctuate significantly from year to year, and many companies struggle to get those costs in line.
Working with a niche staffing firm can help take variable labor costs and make them fixed. Lean, agile companies often limit their core tech staff to business-critical functions so that normal operations can be consistently maintained. Then, throughout the year, they staff specific projects and initiatives with subject matter experts on a short-term contract basis. They access the talent they need, without the costs associated with making a slew of full-time, permanent hires.
Unfilled Tech Positions Lead to Increased Overtime and Burnout
An unfilled tech position puts added strain on your remaining staff. Someone must pick up the slack, and that means you’ve got one or more people on the team doing two (or more) full-time jobs, which often requires overtime pay. Overworking your people for too long will eventually lead to burnout, and burnout leads to more turnover. A staffing partner can help you fill a position with a permanent, full-time candidate or with a contractor until you are able to permanently fill the position, reducing overtime costs and hedging against burnout.
Open Positions Increase Your Cost-To-Hire
As long as a position remains open, you have to pay for the costs of advertising the position, and you are paying for additional man hours every day that your HR team has to spend recruiting for that spot. When you work with a staffing partner to fill open positions, the administrative burden of that process falls on the staffing company, not your internal team, lowering cost-to-hire and keeping HR staff free to focus on tasks and strategies that move the business forward. The staffing firm takes care of administering payroll and benefits to contract professionals and contract-to-hire employees helping to reduce the actual and hidden costs associated with recruiting technical employees.
If you are looking for ways to trim your recruiting budget, shorten your time-to-hire while simultaneously improving the quality of your hires, partner with the IT talent acquisition experts at Talon. To learn more about our track record of helping organizations like yours achieve their hiring and retention goals, contact us today.
