how working with an HR solutions partner can help you cut labor costs.

If your company, like many, is preparing for a potential global recession, it’s likely that you’re taking a close look at your annual budget and looking for ways to cut costs. With labor costs representing a significant portion of this budget, it might be one of the first places you look.

However, today’s tight labor market and growing skills gap make hiring qualified candidates and improving retention rates additional priorities. To realize continued success, you need to ensure you have sufficient human resources to maintain output while also attracting and retaining the right talent. This can make cutting costs difficult.

At first glance, it may seem that working with an HR solutions partner might be an unnecessary expense. However, this type of partnership can actually help your organization cut its workforce spend while improving the quality of hire and retention rates.  

Keep reading to find out how Randstad Inhouse Services can help your business reduce your total workforce spend.

in-depth understanding

To identify the areas where you have the greatest opportunity to save costs and be more financially efficient, you first need a strong understanding of your company’s current position.

Randstad Inhouse Services helps clients obtain these insights by conducting an in-depth business scan. This involves dedicated Randstad process managers, also known as workforce analysts, working closely with stakeholders from various areas of your company — including management, training, operations, HR and finance — to build a picture of where you stand right now, where you want to be in the future, and the steps you can take to reach your goals.

Your process manager — an experienced professional from Randstad assigned specifically to your business — can help you gain a better understanding of your workforce operations by asking vital questions like:

• What are your key business objectives? Do you want to increase revenue, reduce costs or both?
• How do these goals connect to your workforce?
• How do you approach recruitment? What steps are involved in finding and selecting candidates, and how much does this cost?
• What are you spending on vital new-hire activities like induction, onboarding and training?
• How do you decide how many people you need?
• What costs do you face as a result of absenteeism and staff turnover?

Based on this fundamental understanding of the current status of your business — known as your zero measurement — we can identify the most effective actions to drive efficiency and save costs.

cutting labor costs without losing productivity

One of the most common ways Randstad Inhouse Services helps companies cut labor costs is by improving the onboarding process.

Effective onboarding is vital to ensuring new staff members are comfortable in the workplace and prepared to reach a good level of productivity as quickly as possible. The right onboarding program can also improve your employee retention rate. One study shows that 7 out of 10 workers were more likely to stay with the company for at least 3 years after experiencing a strong onboarding process.  

If your organization frequently relies on contingent workers, regular onboarding can be very expensive. No matter how many new hires you need to onboard each year, it’s vital to go about it in the most cost-effective way possible.

Randstad's experience and knowledge in this area means our Inhouse Services division can take over your onboarding process and make it more efficient. One of the ways this is achieved is through the deployment of the latest technologies and innovations, such as remote onboarding solutions. These tools can help you save time and make the best possible use of your resources.

Going a step further than onboarding, training is another area where many large businesses have opportunities to improve. Studies suggest that companies in the United States pay an average of $1,207 per employee on training and development programs each year. Despite how much your organization spends training new hires, you need to evaluate the effectiveness of the training programs you have in place.

For example, overtraining is a particularly common issue. So, ask yourself, ‘Is the company wasting time and money equipping people with skills that aren't essential for their roles or that they might not even use? Or does it create an added layer of flexibility by having people trained on many different tasks or positions?"

Randstad Inhouse Services can assess your current onboarding training process and determine its effectiveness. Our highly experienced team can help you identify any inefficiencies that may exist within your training program and help you develop a strategy for making improvements to your onboarding process.

extensive recruitment experience

Another issue many of today’s organizations are dealing with is an increase in employee turnover rates. According to Randstad’s Workmonitor 2023, 50% of workers are willing to quit for a better work-life balance and 54% would quit if they didn’t feel a sense of belonging at work. On top of that, reports show that the cost of a bad hire can range as high as 30% of the position’s first-year earnings.

One of the most effective ways to limit turnover is by ensuring, from the very beginning, that you're hiring people who have the right skills and experience and are also the right fit for the job, boss and company. Unfortunately, this is not always an easy feat. Here’s where Randstad Inhouse Services can help.

First, we already have a vast network of pre-screened candidates. Our recruiters can quickly look through our talent pool to identify candidates with the required skills, experience and attributes. Secondly, we combine our years of experience in the recruitment and workforce management industry with robust talent insights to better understand workers’ expectations. This allows us to build an effective strategy for attracting your target candidates. Finally, we use the latest technology, such as automated candidate screening and virtual interviews, to successfully match the right candidates to the right employer.

Through a partnership with Randstad, you can improve the quality of hire, which can also boost retention. This, in turn, can reduce the amount you spend on recruiting, onboarding and training.  

reducing direct recruitment costs

Randstad Inhouse Services can help you realize a reduction in direct costs related to recruitment. This means that you’ll realize cost savings almost immediately. For example, Randstad can help you reduce the amount of time and money you spend attracting the right applicants.

This benefit is critical because a lot of the financial commitment involved in hiring workers comes from the need to market and advertise available roles on job boards, social media and other platforms. There is an understandable temptation to position and promote your vacancies on as many channels as possible. This can be an expensive approach to recruitment and doesn’t necessarily guarantee your job post will reach your ideal applicants.

Advertising is just one part of the recruitment process. It also involves screening candidates, conducting interviews, checking references and onboarding. An HR solutions partner, like Randstad, can handle many, or all, of these recruitment tasks for you. For instance, with Randstad Inhouse Services, you have an experienced talent management professional working right onsite to handle many of the day-to-day tasks of managing a contingent workforce.

These solutions can help your company see a reduction in your overall recruitment spend. Additionally, it can reduce the amount of time and resources your workers spend posting job ads, filtering through applicants and completing other tasks. By handing some or all of these tasks off to our professional recruitment team, your workers have the freedom and flexibility to focus on other tasks that could generate more value for your business.

the perfect combination of technology and human insight

Tech innovation is making a vital contribution to the ongoing evolution of HR, and most businesses have something to gain from embracing new systems and technologies to optimize key hiring and workforce management processes. At Randstad, we embrace this technology as a means of providing faster and more efficient services that deliver greater hiring results. When you partner with Randstad, we use these tools to help streamline the recruitment process.

As far as cost efficiency is concerned, methods like electronic invoicing and automation of key tasks, such as applicant screening, reference checking and workforce analytics can give your human staff more time to concentrate on other jobs that make good use of their skills. These processes also reduce the risk of human error, which can have financial implications.

As powerful as technology is in the recruitment industry, we acknowledge that it can’t replace the need for human connections. We also make candidate engagement a top priority. Connecting with applicants at each stage of the recruitment process can improve new hire job satisfaction, quality of hire and retention rates. It’s through this optimal combination of touch and tech that we help clients reduce labor costs while simultaneously improving hiring outcomes.

achieve greater workforce flexibility

Various factors, such as fluctuating markets and seasonal trends, require organizations to scale their workforce up and down as needed. This major factor can make labor cost management incredibly difficult.

One of the most effective ways to deal with these shifting demands is to build a flexible workforce, such as maintaining a team of contingent workers. This strategy allows you to build a pool of temporary workers that you can call in when you need to scale up your workforce. Having the right number of workers filling all shifts makes it easier to meet delivery deadlines and customer expectations.

Since these contingent workers are not on your permanent payroll, you won’t need to retain extra employees during slower periods. Instead, you can scale down your workforce and save on labor costs. However, managing a contingent workforce can be costly and time-consuming unless you work with a talent solutions company to handle these tasks for you.

With Randstad Inhouse Services, your dedicated team can handle all aspects of contingent worker management, including hiring, onboarding and shift scheduling. Our services allow you to reduce your overall labor costs without utilizing more of your company resources or sacrificing quality.

proven results

The Randstad Inhouse Services approach to understanding the workforce and identifying opportunities to minimize costs without losing productivity has delivered results for businesses in a range of industries.

For over 60 years, our teams have delivered top-quality recruitment and workforce management solutions to organizations across the globe. We are currently working on cost savings programs with more than 800 clients, helping them achieve reductions of at least 2% to 3% in their total workforce spend.

When you partner with Randstad, you have instant access to our expertise and skilled recruitment and workforce management teams. Additionally, we provide accurate, up-to-date talent insights to help employers better understand workers’ expectations and compare current salary and benefit offerings with industry standards.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on 1 December 2020.