Cost-per-hire <£100 anyone?

What if your boss said you had to get your cost-per-hire to less than £100?  Assuming you are smart enough to already have it to £500 then that is an 80% reduction!  That's pretty much what Intel have had to work out for their new Atom chip.

Here's the challenge that Intel faced:

Traditional Intel chips may sell for about $100, and have supply chain costs (including inventory costs) of about $5.50, or 5.5% of revenue - an acceptable cost ratio.

However, Intel planned the release of its new Atom chip, a product that was targeted at consumer electronics, mobile devices, web-only computing, emerging markets, and other applications that, in total, represent an annual revenue opportunity of $10 billion or more.

The challenge: the Atom would sell for only about $20 initially, and was headed for an average selling price of perhaps just $10 in a few years. Obviously, a $5.50 cost for the supply chain wasn't anywhere near good enough at those sell prices. Supply chain costs needed to be brought down to perhaps under $1.00 - a decrease of as much as 80% of the level for traditional chips.

You can read the full article at www.scdigest.com.

It is easy to dismiss this comparison but if companies such as Web Recruit are able to offer a "£499 flat fee or your money back" service why can't an in-house recruiter match the same fee level; or even beat it?  You could of course argue that you are not in the Atom, high volume market which is fine but you also cannot afford to sit back and ignore it.