The saying “you get what you pay for” is all too true when it comes to hiring costs. High-quality recruiters cost an arm and a leg, and lower-end recruiters who are less expensive typically just throw you the first candidate they find with the minimum requirements. 

The struggle is real, especially if you are facing limited resources right now or have a non-existent internal talent acquisition team. So how do you source top-tier talent without breaking the bank?

The best way to reduce hiring costs without compromising talent quality is to cut expensive external recruiters and optimize your internal recruiting process. Streamlining core hiring functions (whether you have a dedicated talent team or not) and employing the right talent tools will empower your internal team to source talent effectively and efficiently.

1. Build a talent referral network

If you’re like most teams we talk to, you’re probably managing your referral network by cornering your best employees to go painstakingly through their network with you, connection by connection. The more technical the role is, the longer it takes to go through each employee’s network and the more resources you’re draining just to get a couple of names. 

Streamline the talent referral process by letting employees proactively add referrals directly into your talent CRM. No back-and-forth, no hours-long referral meetings with way too many LinkedIn Tabs and spreadsheets opened.

With Covey’s network referral tool, you can invite your employees via email to upload their LinkedIn connections directly into Covey’s talent CRM. It takes your employees all of a couple of minutes to select who they think is worth interviewing and share if they’re okay with you using their name in outreach messages. And just like that, you can access their full network of contacts. 

In Covey’s network referral tool, employees can indicate with a single click whether they would recommend someone in their network for a role with your organization.

Once contacts are in Covey, hiring managers can easily find the type of candidates they need with filters—like years of experience, title, skill, etc. And employees who shared their contacts can easily use their own CRM portal to see if the person they added has been interviewed for any roles. This visibility shows employees the impact of their referrals, so they're motivated to send more connections

When a hiring manager wants to reach out to someone in their referral network, they can set up automated outreach messages that organically incorporate the referring employee’s name (if they gave permission). Covey users have increased their candidate response rates by three times just by mentioning the referring employee’s name. 

2. More targeted sourcing, more quality candidates

Let’s say you’ve scoured your network referrals, but you haven’t found the right candidate and want a wider talent pool to benchmark against.What then? Are you just relegated to generic boolean searches or expensive external recruiters who charge 25% of the role’s annual salary? No! There is (finally) a tool for that! 

Covey Scout is an intelligent AI co-pilot sourcing tool that automates custom candidate searches. Letting AI take on the busy work of recruiting frees up your internal team to do the candidate-facing work of interviewing and hiring—and saves time and money.

The process starts with you telling Covey Scout exactly what you need. Its intuitive language processing capabilities allow you to use plain language to describe what you want in a candidate, with as many nuances and conditions as you want. 

Essentially, you are training your AI bot to evaluate candidates precisely as you would evaluate them, and to surface the most highly qualified candidates for your unique needs. 

After Covey Scout finds your ideal candidates, it’ll find candidate emails and set up personalized messages to engage candidates on your behalf. See interested candidate responses directly in your inbox.

Covey’s candidate CRM makes finding the ideal candidate easy with extensive filters and talent pipeline tracking.

Once candidates are added to your candidate CRM, even organize them by the role or project you’re hiring for. Or, quickly search through your pool of candidates just like you did with candidates added through referral.

By consolidating both sourced candidates and referral candidates in one CRM, you can easily compare and collaborate on the best candidates for the role. 

3. Automate candidate engagement

If you’ve been spending 20+ hours a week per role just messaging candidates, you might be thinking, “okay, this all sounds great, but referrals and sourcing are only half my job.” The good news is you can also automate candidate engagement in Covey’s talent CRM.

There are two ways you can automate messages to potential candidates:

1. Use the Covey Google Browser Extension to send a templated email campaign directly to whatever LinkedIn profile you’re browsing. The Covey extension will automatically add the candidate to your ATS and personalize the email sequence to their specific profile. If they’re already in your ATS, the extension will notify you before you create a duplicate entry and if another team member has contacted them.

Tired of toggling between your inbox and LinkedIn? With Covey’s browser extension you no longer have to! 🙌

2. Send an email campaign directly from your Covey CRM. Here, quickly see where a candidate is in the candidate pipeline, automate personalized follow-up messages at regular intervals with a single click, and even send messages on behalf of another person in your organization.

Tracking candidate interest has never been easier with message history recorded right in your talent CRM.

Gone are the days of copying and pasting the same message into an email over and over again, searching and replacing candidates’ personal information, and setting constant calendar reminders to follow up. Covey does all of that for you automatically with personalized automated messages. No wonder Covey users are cutting their time spent on sourcing and recruiting by 50%.

Covey: Save on hiring costs without compromising your results

You might be rolling your eyes at the thought of another recruiting tool, and no one would blame you. 

Since the dawn of recruiting (or at least for a very long time), talent teams have struggled to cover the full recruitment life cycle with a single tool. Historically, talent teams have used sales-centered CRMs piggy-backed on top of manual ATSs for recruiting. These legacy systems aren’t broken; they never worked in the first place (unless you think making jigsaw puzzles out of tech tools is fun). 

Not only are legacy tools inefficient, but you can’t easily measure the cost and effectiveness of your talent acquisition with them either. If you can’t measure hiring costs in the first place it’s going to be difficult to reduce hiring costs.

By consolidating your recruiting tech stack into a single end-to-end talent acquisition tool like Covey, you can:

• Effectively collect all of your data in one place

• Easily analyze your data

• Optimize for efficiency and cost-savings

• Spend less time and money on broken systems that don’t get you results

At the heart of Covey is the ability to be lean and purposeful in sourcing and recruiting talent. No more shooting in the dark. No more jerry-rigged ATS and CRM tools that don’t ever work. No more expensive outside recruiting firms that charge an arm and a leg. Just one tool to bring you the best candidate for your specific role. Book a demo to see Covey in action!