iCIMS Hire Expectations™

On the eve of Queen Elizabeth II's post-Independence Day visit to New York, Buckingham Palace made the announcement that the Queen was imposing a hiring freeze for The Royal Household in order to help do her part to trim expenses in the face of a British budget crisis.  And while the hiring freeze accounts for just one portion of the Monarch’s efforts to cut expenses by $4.5 million over the previous year, along with reductions in Royal Travel and expenditures for the upkeep of the Royal Residences, the half-million pound (or approximately US$760,000) cut in The Household’s property services budget is making news in the US where recent employment figures are showing a slower rate of recovery than hoped. 

As an iCIMS employee, I think I can confidently say that a hiring freeze is not the only way for The Household to save on expenses related to its 1,200 person staff.  In fact, a quick visit to the Royal, (oops, I meant ROI) Calculator reveals that The Household could save as much as US$2 million by implementing a candidate management system, with no reduction in its headcount of Fendersmiths or Flagmen. I worked out the problem myself, and came up with the following results.

For a mid-market employer like The Royal Household, the current UK average number of job vacancies per year is 245, and with new graduates finding that they are competing with nearly 70 other applicants for open vacancies this year, that adds up to a lot of Recruiter and Hiring Manager FTEs to track and review all of those resumes/CVs.  In fact, if we assume that the average recruiter earning approximately US$45,000 spends 4 hours receiving, tracking, reviewing and screening all those candidates, then The Household could save almost US$700,000 due to increased recruiter efficiency by using an applicant tracking system.

And for our analysis, we assumed that just one hour would be necessary to submit data for a background check per requisition, but that may be an underestimate considering employment for the Royal Family may entail a considerably more detailed background check. At the estimated one hour figure, however, The Household could save around US$4000 using a candidate management solution to automatically initiate a background check with a third party provider.  Furthermore, in the UK where employers tend to favor using Agencies to fill some hard to find professions (again, Fendersmiths and Flagmen come to mind), The Household could potentially save nearly US$400,000 by deploying a Vendor Portal to automate this process. 

Finally, candidate management systems usually offer benefits that cannot be measured by any ROI calculator, such as contributions to The Royal Household’s green initiatives, which include recycling green waste and computers, installing a wind turbine at Balmoral, and installing LED low-energy light bulbs wherever possible.  By automating its candidate management processes like requisition management and onboarding, The Household could expect to reduce its carbon footprint and paper consumption while attracting, hiring and retaining top talent efficiently.

Any other advice for The Household? Well, in the meantime, let's sit back and see how they will cut their expenses.