With social media and job board websites that are relatively cheap to access, why do so many businesses still spend thousands of pounds on recruitment? For many jobs, it makes perfect sense for the business to recruit on their own, using many of the tolls available to them, such as LinkedIn advertising or posts onto job boards, not to mention the free avenue; word of mouth. There is now such thing as cheap recruitment, thankfully, and more businesses should take advantage of this. Of course, there are cases whereby specialist help is required. This could be a particular industry or niche where you’re looking for a very specific and talented individual, and unfortunately the job boards aren’t going to cut it, especially when we start considering ‘head hunting’.

What is head hunting?

It’s a technique that’s used when there is a very defined background from which the recruiting company is looking for. It’s ideal for when someone wants a person ‘who is from a competitor’ or where that particular expertise is employed in similar, but not competitive organisations. In the case of headhunting, many of the cheap recruitment options simply won’t cut the mustard.

So, putting these recruitment situations aside what are some of the top cheap recruitment options for small businesses? One kind of recruitment that seems to be growing in popularity, especially for small firms, is flat rate recruitment. This kind of recruitment is where you pay an individual or agency a flat rate and they then dish your advert out across social media and job boards. This is a wise option for those who simply want to get their advert out there for hundreds of people to see, and if it’s a job where you know you’ll have many qualified applicants who are interested, it’s a great way to spread the word and receive plenty of CVs to go through. Some of the flat rate agencies will even filter the CVs for you and order them fro most qualified to least, so you can have almost all of the work complete by paying just a few hundred pound. This was unthinkable just a few years ago.

Of course, with LinkedIn as a business orientated social media platform, you can use the advertising feature yourself, spending just a few hundred pounds to spread the word about the opportunity available in your workplace. This can be just as cheap as flat rate recruiting, however, and to ensure your ads are optimised you’ll need to learn a little about LinkedIn ads, so perhaps choosing a social media agency or flat rate recruiter to help is a wise option.

There are of course still the tried and tested traditional methods, such as advertising your job in the local paper and nowadays these are published in print and online, so the reach is still relatively good. Adverts in local papers are often viewed with more trust than a listing on a job board, and you can choose to have candidates email their CV and cover letter over, or call you to learn more.