Use It or Lose It: 3 Ideas for Spending Your Remaining 2016 Hiring Budget

With December fast approaching, meeting your year-end hiring quotas is likely top of mind. A less considered talent-acquisition dilemma might not be as front and center: How could failing to spend your 2016 hiring budget affect your recruitment budget for 2017?

Many companies will not reward under spending; in fact, some will optimize their expenditures by reducing the budgets of departments that didn’t spend what they were allocated. To keep your hiring budget from shrinking in 2017, you’ll likely have to start spending. Stat.

One obvious course of action is to use leftover dollars to fill both open full-time and seasonal positions. After all, while the numbers for 2016 hiring are not finalized, a CareerBuilder survey of nearly 2,550 hiring managers and HR professionals found that 33% of U.S. employers indicated a “plan to hire seasonal staff” while 34% “plan to hire for permanent roles” in Q4.

In this boom, with the expected volume of hiring, leadership will likely expect that recruitment budgets are spent before the end of the year.

However, if you’re a member of the group that is not hiring any additional staff in Q4, spending avenues may not seems so cut and dry. Here are three ideas to help you get your money spent well if you’re in this camp.

1. Recruitment Events

Spending leftover recruiting budgets on events is one way to build candidates’ interest in your company and your own talent pipeline. An informal event can increase visibility and the demand for working at your company.

“We host an end-of-year brunch where we ask every employee to bring a friend,” said Amanda Basse, marketing coordinator for StaySky Hotels & Resorts. “We have it catered with a great spread, and we give away a pair of tickets to a local theme park. This boosts morale for our employees and also gives prospective [candidates] a glimpse into the perks we offer our employees. We also double our referral bonus for every applicant we hire.”

With this kind of targeted approach – hosting an event that caters to the friends of current employees – StaySky Hotels & Resorts is also increasing its referred-candidate pool, a group that’s been linked to shortest time to hire, longer tenure, and better job performance. The lesson? When planning an end-of-year recruiting event, invite your guests strategically.

2. Employer Branding Campaigns

Employer branding campaigns are another way to increase candidate interest in your organization. Employer branding campaigns take many forms, but three to consider are social media marketing spend, video content production, and event sponsorship.

For example, if you have no reqs to fill but don’t want to lose your budget, consider hiring a videographer or a video firm to document the day-to-day operations of your company. Having a well-produced video, complete with testimonials by real employees, is an evergreen asset that serves multiple purposes. A quality employer branding video can create interest in your job opportunities and could help seal the deal with interested candidates by demonstrating the quality of your organization.

If you opt for a paid social media spend, the goal is increasing longer-term demand. So, while a billboard could make a splash, spending on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can increase your following and community exponentially, allowing you to re-engage with people who interacted with your campaign at a later date. Companies like L’Oréal are banking heavily on increasing the size of their aggregate community, with the hopes of recruiting from that pool in the future.

The beauty of the third option – event sponsorship – is that you can spend the cash in Q4 2016 for events that won’t happen until the following year. Do check with your accounting team to ensure your organization tolerates this type of budget accounting.

3. Job Advertising

Sometimes keeping it simple is the best strategy. What role or roles is your organization always looking to fill? Do you find yourself always hiring for a certain position, or are you are challenged by a hard-to-fill position? If so, using your remaining hiring budget to test new sourcing channels at the end of the year can be a valuable experiment that may produce quality results that will help shape your recruitment budget in 2017.

Tools like MightyRecruiter, which streamlines your recruitment process, gives you access to a high-quality resume database, and makes recommendations on the best job boards or online communities to promote your job opportunity to, can be hugely beneficial. The results might just allow your company to head into the new year with new ideas about where the best candidates come from.

The best news? You can try MightyRecruiter for free today. Start your 7-day free trial now.