Recruitment costs on the rise

If you’re making new IT hires this year, chances are good that your company is spending more on its recruitment efforts. According to a report from compensation specialist Culpepper, firms expect to budget a median of $3,205 per new hire this year. That’s an increase of 3% over last year. The number of new hires is also rising, bumping overall recruiting budgets up 8% in 2006.

Web sites are the most commonly used recruiting tools, as cited by 92% Culpepper’s survey of 184 organizations. Monster.com and Career Builder are favorites. Next on the list is the employer’s own Web site, as used by 85% of respondents. And 81% of those surveyed tap into employee referral programs. External recruiters are commonly used by 59% of companies, with internal recruiters not far behind at 50%. Lesser used methods in order of popularity include ads in local media, the intranet, college/university recruiting, temporary-to-permanent hiring, adds in professional association media, e-mail lists, ads in national media, and finally blogs.

Close to half of the companies put prospective technical employees to the test. However, less than one-third do so for HR/administration, finance/accounting and sales applicants. Among the companies that administer a pre-employment test or assessment to applicants of tech positions, 40% use a skills test, 6% administer a personality test, 6% use some type of medical exam, 2% use an intelligence test, and 3% make a cross-cultural adaptability assessment.

Skills tests for tech pros are most likely to be required by small companies with less than 100 employees. Larger companies are more likely to incorporate other forms of assessment in addition to the skills test.

For more information on the report, click here.