It’s time to set 2011 budgets for many recruiting and HR enterprises. Here’s an odd thought: Would your group benefit from spending less on interviews in 2011?

As absurd as it sounds, reducing interview budgets is what I’ve witnessed with many of our clients. The key is leveraging technology to improve or maintain the quality of candidates while reducing the number of interview hours per hire — and significantly reducing cost per hire.

Consider the OneTouch Direct staffing agency. I spoke recently with Dixie Glisson Jr., the recruiting manager at OneTouch.

Here’s the problem OneTouch faced, in Glisson’s own words:

Our main hiring need is for articulate, customer-facing call representatives. The volume of applicants made the vetting process very time consuming. One of our greatest screening steps was to do a live phone interview. On average this phone interview takes 9 minutes. Considering we had over 5000 applicants in 2009, the math dictated that we find a more streamlined tool to help us manage this vital step.

OneTouch decided to see how VoiceScreener could help.

If you’re new to this blog you should know that VoiceScreener is our web-based application for recruiting and hiring professionals. VoiceScreener enables HR pros to use a phone and a simple web dashboard to create, record and distribute custom voice interviews.

VoiceScreener significantly reduced the portion of recruitment time that OneTouch devoted to interviews. Compared with their prior spend of 9 minutes of recruiter time per interview, “VoiceScreener has reduced [that] time to around 3 minutes,” reports Glisson. He continues:

In addition to the time savings, we are able to share VoiceScreener interviews with others who have a stake in the hiring order. This allows us at times to make a group decision to move forward with a candidate.

Cases like this one suggest to us that this more collaborative hiring environment aids in making faster and smarter decisions. If so, this is one budget reduction that improves a staffing firm’s bottom line three ways. It fulfills on all of the golden promises of technology: Better, cheaper, faster.

Will reducing your interviewing budgets work for you? Everyone who is receiving benefits for VoiceScreener started by first contacting us, or taking this 5-minute demo. Do it now.

Graphic acknowledgement: bossone, shared via Creative Commons