​A bad recruitment process rarely looks expensive at the start.

Someone leaves. Their workload gets shared around. You start recruiting. Everyone manages.

Then six weeks becomes three months.

The manager is picking up extra work. The team is stretched. Customers aren't getting quite as much attention. People are staying later. Things that aren't urgent get pushed to next week

And the vacancy is still open.

Keep that going for long enough and one replacement can very quickly become three.

That's when recruitment gets expensive.

So how does a straightforward replacement end up becoming a three-month headache?

In my experience, you can normally trace it back to the very start of the process.

It Starts With The First Conversation

“Just send me some CVs.”

Every recruiter has heard it.

It sounds efficient. Skip the meeting, send the job description over and we'll get some people across.

But that first conversation often sets the precedent for how the entire process is going to run.

If we don't properly understand why you're recruiting, what the team needs, what success looks like, what's genuinely essential and where there's flexibility, we're starting on the back foot.

And please don't tell me that we don’t need to call because “it's all in the job description.”

I can't stand job descriptions.

I've read hundreds of Account Manager JDs over the years and, honestly, most of them could have been written for the same job.

• Build strong customer relationships.

• Identify opportunities for growth.

• Work cross-functionally.

• Deliver against targets.

• Be commercially minded.

Look familiar….?

Yet speak to the businesses behind them and those Account Manager roles can be completely different jobs:

• One needs someone to protect and grow a huge existing account.

• Another needs a proper door opener.

• One is incredibly analytical.

• Another lives and dies by relationships.

• One person is inheriting a well-oiled machine

• Someone else is being brought in to steady the ship.

You don't get that from five bullet points under “Key Responsibilities”.

Anyway... my hatred of job descriptions is probably a rant (and a blog) for another day.

The point is that a document can't replace a proper conversation.

• Why has the vacancy come about?

• Why did the last person leave?

• What does this person actually need to achieve?

• What's the team like? What's not working currently?

• What won't you compromise on?

• Where can we flex?

Get that wrong at the beginning and everything afterwards becomes harder.

But getting the brief right doesn't mean we've cracked it either. Because once we start speaking to candidates, something else gets a say in your recruitment process.

The Market.

We go out with what we believe is the right profile. We speak to people. We find out what they're earning, what would make them move, what they think of the opportunity and, importantly, why some of them aren't interested.

Sometimes the market tells us something we weren't expecting.

The salary isn't competitive. The experience you're looking for is too specific. The working pattern is reducing the talent pool. Or the people you thought would want the job simply don't. That's not necessarily a failed search -it's useful information.

But it's only useful if we can actually do something with it. We need access. We need honest feedback. And we need the ability to pivot when something isn't working. Quickly. If it takes two weeks to get feedback on a CV, another week to agree that something needs to change and several more days to get an interview in the diary, we've lost momentum.

Good candidates aren't sitting around waiting for us to figure it out.

And this is where speed starts to matter. Not because recruiters are impatient and want feedback on their CVs, but because while all of this is happening, the vacancy doesn't exist in isolation.

Someone else is carrying the load

The work doesn't disappear when somebody leaves.

Someone takes on an extra customer. A manager gets dragged further into the day-to-day. Another team member puts off something they should be focusing on. People stay later. Everyone pulls together. For a few weeks, people cope. For a few months, it starts to hurt.

Eventually, the people who stayed can start wondering why they're still carrying an extra workload because a vacancy hasn't been filled.

That's why I don't think the cost of getting recruitment wrong is simply the cost of making a bad hire. Sometimes it's the cost of taking too long to make a good one.

Because if an overstretched team loses another person while you're still trying to replace the first, you've now got two vacancies. If the manager is spending half their week interviewing, covering work and firefighting, something else is suffering too.

One vacancy becomes two. Two can become three. And suddenly the original recruitment problem looks very different.

Where Should A Recruiter Fit Into This?

The answer isn't that every vacancy needs an agency. It doesn't.

I'm a recruiter and I'll happily say that.If you've got a strong internal recruitment team, plenty of relevant applicants and the time to run the process properly, you might not need us. But if you're going to use a recruiter, use them properly.

The value shouldn't be that I can find a CV and email it to you. If that's all you're getting, I'd question the fee too.

The value should be knowing the market:

• Knowing who isn't applying.

• Understanding what would make someone move.

• Challenging the brief when it needs challenging.

• Telling you when the salary isn't going to work.

• Giving you honest feedback about how the opportunity is being received.

• And then being able to change direction quickly when we learn something.

That requires access and communication on both sides.

If the relationship is simply:

Send CV… wait… chase… wait again… receive limited feedback… repeat... then we're not really recruiting together.

We're throwing things at the wall and hoping something sticks. The best recruitment processes I've been involved in tend to have the same things in common.

• There's access to the hiring manager.

• There's honest feedback.

• Decisions happen relatively quickly, or at the very least, there's communication when there isn't a decision yet.

• Both sides challenge each other.

And when something isn't working, we change it. It doesn't mean every candidate is perfect. It means we learn quickly enough to get closer to the right one.

Recruitment Has A Very Obvious Cost.

The fee.

It lands neatly on an invoice, which makes it incredibly easy to measure. Someone looks at that figure and naturally asks:

“Was that worth it?”

But there are plenty of recruitment costs that never arrive neatly on an invoice.

• Three months of an unfilled position.

• Hours spent reviewing unsuitable CVs.

• Managers interviewing the wrong people.

• The existing team absorbing additional workload.

• Opportunities being missed because people are stretched.

• Another employee deciding they've had enough.

Or finally making the hire, getting it wrong and starting the entire process again six months later.

Those costs are much harder to quantify. But they're very real.

So perhaps the question shouldn't only be:

“How much is this going to cost us to recruit?”

It should also be:

“How much could it cost us if we don't recruit properly?”

Because recruitment can be expensive.

But getting recruitment wrong costs a hell of a lot more.