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For hiring managers and human resources representatives responsible for hiring scientists, today’s leaner recruiting budgets should offer a stimulus to take a closer look at the type of recruitment advertising options they select. The temptation may be to pick the least expensive options. However, to find the proper level of candidate for these types of positions, you need to identify the most cost efficient sources that produce the highest quality hires and measure your results very carefully. The number to measure is cost per hire, not cost per resume.

Before you begin your recruitment and advertising efforts, make sure you are using the best resource you have at your disposal - the scientists within your own company. If you are recruiting for a molecular biologist position, find out how other molecular biologists at your company found their positions. What scientific journals do they read? What ads do they respond to?

Consider conducting surveys with current employees: the results could influence your choices of where to advertise to attract qualified candidates. Surveys can be informal, especially in smaller organizations and departments, with just a short list of questions to determine what types of ads employees would respond to or where they would look for ads. More formal survey processes can also be conducted by outside consulting companies, often taking months to capture the data. This process is not recommended for positions that need to be filled in a short time period.

Once you determine the best places to advertise and to find candidates, it is critical that you have an effective measuring and tracking system in place. Otherwise you won’t have the actual numbers that can lead you to your most successful source for hires. You also will not have the numbers you will need to track your “return on investment.”

Measuring and tracking system
While there are a host of these systems in the marketplace like industry leaders BrassRing, Recruitsoft, and Webhire, the system used need not be very sophisticated for you to track your own numbers. It could even be a simple spreadsheet that you keep updated at your desk.

What’s important is that the system is fully implemented and that it provides the following numbers for each position advertised in a specific medium:

1. How many resumes were received
2. How many of the resumes received met the minimum qualifications
3. How many of the resumes resulted in interviews
4. How many resumes resulted in offers
5. How many resumes resulted in actual hires
6. What was the cost per hire

If you are about to purchase a new applicant tracking system you should evaluate the following:

1. The financial stability of the vendor. If the company has to go out of business- what process will the company put into place so that you can easily transport data and resumes?

2. The ability to switch to new applicant tracking systems, without losing resumes or information.

3. The ability to identify resumes by source and previous employers, not only by keywords. So, for example, if you want to see all the applicants that responded to your ad in Science last week, you should be able to do that, and present those resumes to the hiring manager.

4. What kind of training will the company provide to recruiters and/or hiring managers?

5. What is the cost structure? For example: Is it based on numbers of users to access the system, number of hires, number of resumes processed, number of employees at the company?

The effectiveness of the ad campaign
The effectiveness of the ad can be measured by the kind of response it has elicited. Initially, you will be able to evaluate the reach of your ad by the number of resumes received. In the case of online job postings, you can know within hours how effective the ad is; but you should allow one to two weeks to fully judge the results.

However, what is even more important than the quantity of the resumes received is the quality of the resumes received. An ad that attracts 15 resumes with nine candidates the hiring manager wants to interview is more valuable than the ad that attracts a flood of resumes with unqualified candidates.

The quality of the resumes received
You will only be able to assess the quality once you have established the criteria a candidate must have in order to be reviewed with the hiring manager or hiring team. For example if an established requirement for a medicinal chemist position is a Ph.D. with relevant postdoctoral experience, then it is important to evaluate the number of resumes received from candidates that have this qualification.

How many interviews were granted
Once you have established what a quality resume is, you will then look at the number of qualified candidates that went on to the phone screening portion of the hiring process. The next benchmark to evaluate is how many phone screens turned into in-person interviews, where the candidate was invited to the company to meet with a hiring representative or manager. If you are unsure about what sources your interviews came from, make sure you always ask during the interview how the candidate heard about the position. If the candidate saw the ad in multiple places, make note of that.

How many offers were made and accepted
Looking at the number of offers presented will tell you the level of the quality of the candidates that were interviewed for the position. It will also tell you how well your company does to convert offers presented to offers accepted. If it takes a high number of offers presented to result in a new hire, these numbers need to be looked at very carefully.

How many hires were made and cost per hire
As you look at the number of hires that have resulted from your advertising sources, you should also pay attention to your cost per hire number. You also want to look at your organization’s overall cost per hire number. Cost per hire can be calculated by including all costs associated with generating candidate interviews, and dividing this number by the number of hires. This should include all advertising costs plus other associated expenses which could include travel arrangements for interviews, relocation expenses, contract recruiter or contract research fees, and career fair expenses. Unfortunately, there isn’t an official industry standard for the biotech and pharmaceutical industries to use as a benchmark.

When evaluating cost efficiency, you should also calculate the time it took to fill the position and the work involved in screening resumes. If you posted a position on a website that appeared to have been one of the least expensive options, you need to look at the overall cost effectiveness. This also includes how much time you spent screening unqualified resumes or how many times you had to repost the position.

What to do if the response to the advertisement was poor
At this point, if the response to a specific advertisement was relatively poor, you may want to go back to your account representative and report your findings. It is quite possible that you may need to make some changes to the ad or posting. If it is an online posting, it may even be possible that you need to post it under a different category. You should work with your account representative to make sure you are getting the most for your investment. If this still doesn’t work, then this venue may not be the best place to attract qualified candidates for your position or positions.

Final note
As you evaluate your recruiting efforts from the various sources you used to locate candidates, you will hopefully be able to determine your best sources for qualified candidates. However, what worked before will not necessarily work in the future or better alternatives may emerge. This is why the methodology discussed here must be in place so that the sources can be reevaluated periodically. Once you have identified your best sources for candidates and have a process in place to evaluate and reevaluate, you will be able to shorten the amount of time it takes to find qualified candidates.

See this article on the Science Careers website.

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