As part of the Talent Initiative, Greater Mankato Growth is publishing a guest blog series highlighting the programs, tools and resources that are available in our marketplace. This series can serve as a catalog or library for businesses to address workforce issues. 

Highlighting the Hiring Burden

Contributed by: Grant Moody, Express Employment Professionals

Express Employment Professionals recently released survey results revealing the time and effort it takes business owners to fill a vacant job. Business leaders from multiple industries report the huge burden they face in filling one single job.

Depending on the industry, business leaders report that candidate searches can involve reviewing as many as 16 resumes and up to five interviews. Finding the right person for the job is an important task, and businesses say they bear a highly resource-intensive search process.

“It’s obviously a long process, especially for small business owners—those with fewer than 100 employees,” said Bob Funk, CEO of Express. “Businesses spend hours and hours looking for the right candidates—taking away time and resources they can’t spend on the rest of their business needs. This is a frustration we hear from businesses again and again.”

Business decisions come down to time and money, and finding the right set of skills and attributes to match the company’s culture, and the specific job requirements is not easy, but is very important.

Even for general labor type jobs, businesses say they review up to 15 resumes and conduct four interviews. This increases for administrative and professional roles. This time commitment does not include drafting and placing advertisements for job openings, recruiting, conducting reference checks and any required testing or other screening.

With today’s changing workforce and record-low labor force participation, employee retention remains one of the top challenges facing business today. These survey results confirm that finding the best people to fit the jobs they have remains an important—and necessary—priority for business today.

The survey of 390 businesses in the United States and Canada that are current and former clients of Express Employment Professionals was conducted in the second quarter of 2016.