CIPD Recruitment, Retention and Turnover Survey

I'm mentioning the CIPD’s annual Recruitment, Retention and Turnover Survey in tomorrow's newsletter.  Unfortunately, I wont have enough space to include all their summary findings but I thought the data was interesting enough to share here.  It's great to see that nearly three quarters of the companies they surveyed use external recruiters (even if they find them costly).  Nice to see more evidence that job boards haven't caused the demise of agencies as some commentators predicted a few years back.  Anyway, here are the CIPD survey's summary findings:

• Key reasons for recruitment difficulties are lack of necessary specialist skills (65%), followed by higher pay expectations (46%) and insufficient experience (37%).
• 73% of organisations still engage recruitment agency services to help fill job vacancies.
• Most respondents agree or strongly agree that using agencies considerably increases the cost of their recruitment spend (76%).
• 59% fail to evaluate agency performance.
• A third of employers don’t possess a preferred supplier list.
• 81% of those employers using recruitment agencies do so for hiring temporary workers and 78% for seeking permanent staff.
• The key driver for organisations’ move away and decline of agency usage is to cut down on recruitment costs (72%). Adopting a direct-hire strategy is also identified as another motive for not using or reducing the use of agency services (53%).

The following initiatives were found to help organisations to overcome recruitment difficulties:

• using the employer brand as a recruitment tool (75% say it has a positive impact but only 31% currently use)
• offering flexible working (74% say it has a positive impact but only 30% currently use)
• targeting migrant workers from EU countries and recruiting staff from abroad (75% say it has a positive impact but only 14% currently use)

The survey  will be available from 22 June from the CIPD website at www.cipd.co.uk/surveys