5 questions to evaluate ROI with your HR partner

Hiring people is tough. We get it.

Hiring the right people? Sometimes it seems an impossible task for organizations.

The right staffing partner can change the equation, making sourcing, hiring and onboarding great talent easier. But if you’re working with a recruiter, it’s important to understand the return you’re getting on your investment so you know if they’re the right partner for you.

professional recruitment doesn’t always mean profitable recruitment

It’s an unfortunate truth that paying for recruiting doesn’t automatically mean you’re getting your money’s worth.

And hiring is expensive to begin with, so you certainly don’t want an HR partner driving up costs. The metrics vary depending on which study you look at, but most agree that hiring a new employee costs thousands of dollars even before you start paying their benefits and salary. One survey cited an average cost of $4,000 per new hire. That includes recruitment, onboarding and training processes, so simply filling a single position could cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars.

The wrong HR partner can drive up that cost—and increase internal work demands and frustrations—by:

Failing to understand position requirements and throwing unqualified or inappropriate candidates at open roles
Being too slow to fill positions, causing you to experience work delays or poor customer experience issues due to being understaffed
Not paying attention to company culture, which leads to qualified candidates that can do the job in question but may still cause friction in the workplace or be unhappy on the job
Filling positions with candidates that don’t stick around, which almost doubles your hiring investment—it costs around 1.5x to replace an employee than to retain them

find out if you’re working with the right staffing agency

Determining whether your recruitment partner is a good fit or whether you should ditch them for another partner requires a bit of work.

It’s tempting to go with gut feelings. You don’t feel like you’re getting the best of the bargain, so you want to switch to someone else. But this can lead to partner hopping, where the grass always looks greener in someone else’s recruiting yard. Moving to another staffing partner can take a lot of work, so before you go, you need to ensure you’re really not getting the ROI you need from the current arrangement.

Gut feelings also don’t do much when it comes to getting buy-in from other stakeholders. You can’t walk into a board meeting and say, “I have a feeling we’re not getting what we’re paying for when it comes to HR service.” No VP of anything is going to make a major business decision based solely on someone’s gut feeling.

Before you make a decision—or ask executives to make one—do the work to answer a few key questions. We’ve created a detailed guide to help you ask the right questions. In the guide, we’ll look at the metrics you should be evaluating with your HR partner including: