Hey HR and Recruiting leaders - It's the early days of budget season - or at least prep for budget season - for a lot of you.

If you are like me, you're likely looking at headcount projections for next year - as well as thinking about your overall benefit costs for the coming year.

Smart. Those things are important.

BUT WAIT - There's one thing you won't think about until it's too late - HOW YOUR RECRUITMENT MARKETING/ADVERTISING BUDGET needs to change.

That's why I'm here to give you a primer related to where to look.  I'm a partner in a recruiting firm called Kinetix.  We're headquartered in Atlanta, and in addition to pure recruiting, we help a lot of clients manage their recruitment marketing presence - careers site, social recruiting presence, video, etc.  

We also help clients understand the efficiency of their recruitment marketing spend - job boards, Indeed, LinkedIn and more - as part of a service called Kinetix Buzz.

I know - you don't have time to look at this right now - so I'm going to give you the trends we see at Kinetix related to recruitment marketing spend - and some things I think you'll find when you look at this area via source of hire and source of candidate info.  Here's a top line of what we find when we first start helping companies:

1. Your Careers site is over-reported as a Source of Hire

2. Job Boards and aggregators may need re-balancing based on industry shifts

3. Better targeting of markets is available for job boards, specifically CareerBuilder

4. Fully utilizing LinkedIn Spend is complicated

5. Your recruiting database is underutilized

6. A significant opportunity exists related to creating a sourcing function and measuring it with the same discipline as Job     Boards

7. Experimental spend should focus on bleeding edge tools like the Google Ad Display Network

8. Employment Branding investment at your company lags that of high-performing peers

9. Your Indeed strategy related to sponsored jobs is likely in need of a refresh

That's where you should start when you have time to focus on this area of your budget.  Start with analysis of these areas, and you'll be doing the pre-work you need to understand how your budget needs to change for the upcoming year.

If you're too busy or can't get to it - drop me a note and I'll have someone from my company call to figure out a way to help you.  In addition to this analysis, we've got a package we call Kinetix Buzz that starts with your careers site and works through all of these areas to help you maximize the results of your spend.

Good luck in budget season!  Your Excel skills are going to blow up in the next 3 months!!!