How to Streamline the Hiring Process to Boost Recruitment ROI

This blog post was originally published on March 27, 2023, and was updated on February 4, 2025.

“We need to hire workers faster — but we can’t keep spending this much on recruitment.”

Sound familiar? If you’re facing pressure to fill vacancies quickly while also reducing recruitment costs, you’re not alone. These challenges are among the issues most consistently reported by hiring teams across the UK.

The Labour government’s Autumn budget expanded employers’ national insurance contributions and increased the national minimum wage. Looming changes to workers’ rights could drive the cost of employing staff even higher.

5 Ways to Streamline the Recruitment Process

With worker shortages and budget constraints unlikely to disappear anytime soon, all you can do is find ways to increase the return on the funds you allocate to hiring. We’ve identified a few key steps hiring teams can toward recruitment process optimisation — how many of these has your organisation implemented?

1. Identify Issues in Your Processes

Inefficiencies in your recruitment systems could be costing your team more than you realise. Review every step of your hiring process to identify gaps, delays, redundancies, and other issues that may be increasing the time it takes to fill vacancies — and hurting recruitment ROI.

How much time is spent manually posting ads on different digital channels?
Does the need to create different versions of a job ad for different platforms slow you down?
What percentage of applications you receive are duplicates or unqualified?
Are you collecting applications in different formats and then spending time to standardise them for review?
Do you have secondary screening measures in place on your hiring channels?

Any of these issues can increase recruitment costs unnecessarily — and without your team even noticing.

Modern recruitment technology can help identify and address issues hindering your recruitment efforts — it’s all a matter of choosing the right solution.

Download your copy of 3 Ways Recruitment Technology Will Change Hiring in 2025 for guidance on selecting hiring technology that can help your team.

2. Boost Your Brand Reputation

A growing number of job seekers — especially those in Gen Z — are considering an organisation’s reputation when applying for jobs. What does your brand stand for? What are the workforce culture and employee experience like? Last year’s resourcing and talent planning report from CIPD suggests that 81% of brands are taking action to improve their reputation to improve hiring and retention.

Streamline the hiring process by ensuring your website and job adverts clearly convey your company values and what applicants can expect when working for your company.

3. Increase Your Reach

Effective recruitment campaigns must reach applicants where they are — and that’s a space that is increasingly fragmented in today’s hiring world. A quick post on a couple of major job boards and a vacancy listing on your website aren’t enough to reach the applicants you need in this fast-paced, mobile-first job space. You can boost recruitment ROI by posting your job ad on a variety of channels:

4. Improve Worker Retention

Decreasing your recruitment needs is a guaranteed step toward reducing recruitment costs. While some high-volume hiring initiatives can’t be avoided — seasonal jobs or significant corporate expansion can’t be solved with worker retention — reducing churn is a great way to improve recruitment ROI. Investing in employee development and advancement opportunities, offering competitive benefits or flexible work arrangements, and fostering a healthy workplace culture can all help ensure your workers don’t consider employment elsewhere.

Did You Know? 41% of UK employers have had new recruits resign within their first 12 weeks of employment.

5. Centralise and Automate Systems

Job market fragmentation has exacerbated the challenges today’s hiring teams face, but recruitment technology has responded in a big way to help overcome this issue. Centralised hiring platforms (like Hirematic) allow recruitment across multiple digital channels from a single dashboard and can automate budget optimisation with programmatic tools that reallocate spending based on where job ads perform best.

Many of these solutions can also integrate seamlessly with Applicant Tracking Systems, which also help centralise and automate the processes of receiving, screening, and sorting applications — saving recruitment teams significant time and money.

Improve Your ROI with Hirematic Recruitment Technology

Hirematic’s omnichannel recruitment marketing platform helps users optimise recruitment ROI, centralise hiring across a wide range of digital channels, and leverage data to drive organisational growth and profitability. Contact our team to learn more about what we can do for you.