When most people think of the cost to hire an architect, they immediately think of their monthly wages. What they don’t think of is everything that happens in the background and the cost of it all.
Everything from the sourcing, the onboarding, and all the way up to the continuous HR and administrative aspects of hiring staff, everything has a cost and it’s not just monetary, time is also burned away. Partnering with a full-service BPO is a proven method that helps businesses of any size overcome the obstacles of hiring architects.
Recruitment Monetary Costs
The time spent recruiting an architect will vary depending on your specific needs, with more niche specifications taking the longest, equating to more money spent.
The average cost per employee recruited as of 2022 is between $3,500 and $4,000. With recruitment being a multi-step process, each step will have different monetary costs depending on your tools.
Aside from having to pay recruiters to search for possible candidates, you need to have places to search. While there are free sourcing methods such as posting on LinkedIn or Facebook, there are websites dedicated to job searches, such as Glassdoor and Indeed which are paid services. These websites have more traction due to being established and already having a wide range of users. Job seekers are able to post on them without any payment, but recruiters have to pay to post.
These job sites offer different plans that give various levels of access to businesses. As an oversimplified example, a base package could be $20 a month to post 10 jobs simultaneously, while a more premium package could be $100 a month for unlimited posts with the ability to have certain posts appear higher up on search results.
Salary negotiations that take place will also impact how much a candidate will cost you. Finding a great candidate but not agreeing on compensation may cause a reset on recruitment which will end up costing more.
Time Spent Recruiting
The real cost of recruiting in-office is time. From the initial sourcing to the actual hiring day, it takes an average of 41 days to hire someone for any position. Some positions will have a much shorter time to hire than others, but it’s all dependent on the specifications necessary for the job.
As an extreme example and using the average 41 days to hire time frame, picture your company trying to hire an architect to assist on a job that you recently won the bid. 41 days is quite some time, especially for a project. This is around the time that most companies take to finish the sketch or pre-design. That would mean being a whole month behind schedule if your team is overloaded.
With your company’s reputation on the line, you would need to source and recruit at a much faster rate. Do note that this is an extreme example, as it is unlikely that you would be understaffed before a project as an established company would have the resources to hire all necessary staff.
Being able to hire reliable staff in a timely manner not only saves you money and time but also cuts back on the amount of stress on you and your team.
Administrative Monetary Costs
Administrative expenses include the salaries of the HR and IT departments, as well as the infrastructure costs. Unlike recruitment costs which will fluctuate depending on the season, administrative costs will mostly stay the same with a general rule of thumb.
The more staff you hire, both client-facing and internal, the lower the admin costs will be proportionate to company size. The standard ratio between HR staff to other staff is 1.4 to 100. Picture 1 HR staff to 10 employees, if you’re a startup company with only 8 total staff, that 1 employee is managing the HR needs of 8 staff, whereas if you had 1 HR staff supporting 50 employees, their responsibility is greater and you get more for your money. While there is definitely a time where HR employees have too much on their plate and additional HR staff must be hired, these costs won’t fluctuate wildly.
The infrastructure costs will differ based on location and company size. If you have ample space and can accommodate more staff, then it shouldn’t be too costly to have a station for your staff to work at. The problem comes in when you need to take on more staff to accommodate your growing business but there isn’t any more physical room for growth. You can only cram so many people into a room before it becomes a problem.
Time Spent on HR Tasks
This ties in closely with the monetary cost of administrative tasks. If the amount of daily work each HR staff has causes them to struggle with completing tasks, they may have to work overtime or you might need to hire new HR staff.
The added workload causes stress and lowers morale for the team, which might eventually lead to burnout and resignation. In the long run, attrition will cost you more than just hiring more staff to alleviate the downward pressure.
Outsourcing Solutions
Outsourcing positions to full-service BPOs is one way to alleviate the strain of hiring new architects. Partnering with the right BPO will actually solve many of the problems associated with hiring architects or any specialized position for that matter.
In regards to recruitment costs, both financial and time-wise, once partnered up with a BPO, the recruitment will be included as part of the fee. You’ll have a dedicated team working to find the right fit for your position, this means the candidates will fit both your skill requirements and company culture.
Depending on the position, remote recruiting can also be significantly faster. The location of the remote staff member will be important too, as certain countries have an abundance of different specialized professionals.
On the administrative side, partnering with a BPO will also eliminate the need for your current HR to take over the remote staff. The internal team at the BPO of your choice will handle all the HR and IT needs of your new remote architect. This allows you or the appropriate manager to focus on more pressing matters and to actually lead your team without having to think about tasks that don’t affect your bottom line.
As an added note, if you decide to outsource your architectural needs to another country, you have the added bonus of finding cost-effective architects as the average salary range for them in other countries, such as the Philippines, will be lower.
The Wrap Up
The cost of hiring architects is much higher than just their monthly wages. You have to take into consideration all of the other departments that are involved and factor in the time it would take for everything to happen.
A full-service BPO can eliminate the workload for your team as the internal team at the BPO would take over all administrative aspects of your staff, not to mention the significant salary difference architects have in different countries.
If you’re in need of another architect with a specific set of skills, why not reach out to a BPO and talk to them about their many services, you’re sure to find a solution tailored to your needs.