How to develop a business case for a recruitment technology project

If you are looking to secure budget and executive approval for a recruitment technology project, you need to be well prepared. Many business cases fall at the first hurdle as they don’t contain the right content to spark interest, using facts and detailing the return on investment.

Whether you are looking to replace your existing ATS/Recruitment System or implement a new system to replace a manual recruitment process, now more than ever you are likely to be competing against other projects and budgets, so there is a greater need to demonstrate the benefits.

Where to start

Start by gathering all the information you need.

• Will you need a sponsor/Who could this be?
• What is the process for submitting projects?
• What is the approval process and stages?
• How will the recruitment technology project align with the overall company strategy?
• Define the high-level project scope and deliverables. What are your smart objectives?
• Look at each stage of the recruitment process and what is required - Systems, People & Process.

Scoping the business case

It is essential to define the challenges you’re trying to solve. Think about the end-to-end recruitment journey and the problems experienced, how this impacts the team, candidate experience, time lost and costs to be saved. What is the bottom-line impact and contribution to the business, and how can your project support the company strategy?

Here are some pointers to help you uncover the need:

• Approvals: Raising new roles, who is involved? How long do you spend on each one? Where are the delays, and do they impact time to fill? What is your time to authorise?
• Attraction: How you recruit, where you post roles, what your application to hire ratio is by source, what brand message you convey to prospective candidates and the mechanism/ease for them to apply.
• Candidate screening: Do you review candidates manually? How long is spent screening each candidate? Are all candidates in one system?
• Compliance – Do you have a robust and GDPR compliant process to manage the data and document collection process from registration and application through to onboarding?
• Rate your current recruitment capability and risk to the business. You can use 0-1 or Red, Amber, Green - just be consistent.

Project resources

What resources will you need to carry out the project? Which departments and people will be required to help – IT, HR, Marketing? You need to consider how you get their buy-in and involvement.

Identify the core roles and their needs as part of your E-recruitment strategy. These free checklists are a good place to start.

Project costs and ROI

The business case should clearly present all costs that are involved and how long it will take for your project to pay for itself.

When considering ROI, understand each stage of your recruitment process and who is involved, how long manual processes take, any external costs (such as agencies/PSL) and how many hours per week you spend preparing management reports.

For example, if you are looking to automate manual processes, a task you spend a large amount of time on could be booking face to face interviews with candidates. Start with the number of vacancies, multiply by the average number of candidates interviewed per vacancy, then by minutes spent arranging each interview. This will give you the number of hours spent.

If you then multiply the number of hours spent by the average hourly rate this would give you the cost-saving of that activity. Also think broader than just the cost-saving – what would you do with those hours back? What value add activity could you be doing instead?

You can then replicate the process for other manual activities such as vacancy approval, vacancy advertising, preparing offers and onboarding documentation.

To get you started, download this free Recruitment Metrics cookbook to gain valuable insights on the recruitment process and how you can create benchmarks to understand the potential efficiency gains.