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Bringing new talent onto your team is never easy. It’s time-consuming, expensive, and even stressful. Finding the right person for a role can feel like you’re searching for a needle in a haystack. When time is of the essence, problems like mis-hiring can arise.
Whether you have a recruiter on-staff or you’re leaning on your human resources team, you may want to supplement their efforts and increase productivity by working with a recruitment agency.
Contrary to popular belief, a recruitment agency can actually lower your costs of hiring and make the process much more efficient. Costs need to be considered in terms of advertising your vacancy, administrative costs and time spent looking for that potential hire. Promoting and posting one-off jobs can be expensive. A recruitment agency on the other hand, has allocations to the best job boards, ensuring that your job is advertised in all the correct places. Instead of dealing with a seemingly endless sea of applicants, a recruitment agency can give you access to the best talent, including talent that is currently employed elsewhere.
They also reduce the layers from the screening process by running background checks, following up with references, and conducting preliminary interviews, freeing up your time, so you can concentrate on pre-screened and vetted candidates who are a qualified fit for the position.
Not sure how to get started? Here are some questions you should address before you go about enlisting the help of a recruitment agency.
Understanding how often you hire can help determine how you want to go about working with an agency. If you hire irregularly, you probably should not have staff dedicated to the process. Considering that the cost of hiring can be about USD40,000 per employee, keeping someone on the payroll for this task could be detrimental to your bottom line. In this instance, investing in a recruitment agency could be money well spent.
On the flipside, your staff will probably need to look at a lot of resumes if you hire regularly. A good amount of those resumes will be from unqualified candidates, or people who have proper credentials but are not a good culture fit. This can lead to a ton of wasted manpower and hours; in other words, it’s a waste of money.
Wouldn’t it be a better investment if your staff could focus on meeting with and hiring the right candidates instead? This administrative work can easily be outsourced to a recruitment agency.
Whether an agency is necessary for your firm to keep up with seasonal hires, or if you simply want your HR staff focusing on something besides sifting through countless cover letters, a recruitment agency could be the exact solution you’re looking for.
During the hiring process, you will naturally interview candidates who are not qualified for the position you’re filling as well as people who are simply not the right fit for your team. That time spent can be minimised drastically by bringing on a recruitment agency.
The clearer you are with a recruiter about your needs, wants, and culture, the easier it’s going to be for you to sit down with the right people. Just like any relationships and partnerships, you’ll find that the longer you work with the same recruiter, the more familiar they’ll become with your organization. As your relationship progresses, they’ll be able to set you up with qualified candidates and fill your role in a more timely manner.
There are a few ways you can work with a recruiter. You can, choose to retain them, paying them upfront and allowing them alone to fill positions. This kind of agreement is reserved for high-level or niche positions since they’re more difficult to fill.
A contingency relationship is a more common agreement, in which you can be working with multiple agencies to fill the position. You’ll only need to pay the one who successfully finds the winning candidate.
You could also work with a recruiter to find temporary workers. If you end up thinking they’re a phenomenal addition to your team, you can transfer them to your payroll and keep them on permanently.
The percentages of fees that you pay will vary depending on the recruitment agency and type of warranty structure you choose to work with.
It’s completely natural to wonder what risks are involved when working with a third party to do something as instrumental as hiring. The good news is that recruitment agencies offer guarantee periods.
Guarantee periods are probationary terms. For example, if the person placed in the role ends up not being the right fit, you can make the decision to fill the position again within a set amount of time, and have the agency restart the search process at no cost to you.
In basic terms, if a candidate isn’t what you thought, you don’t take the hit. The responsibility falls on the recruiting agency to rectify the situation and find someone else who fits the bill.
If a recruitment agency seems to tick all the checkboxes but you still aren’t sure on whether you’re ready to work with one, consider these other benefits. Your typical HR professional may not be well-versed in the minutia of finance, accounting, or the specialized field you may be hiring in. Recruiters, however, possess expertise in the field in which you are hiring, understanding the technical skills and soft skills that a candidate needs to possess.
Additionally, if you’re just looking at applicants, you may be missing out on candidates that aren’t actively searching for a new role, but are still open to opportunities. Recruiters can find these candidates and bring them into the conversation. According to LinkedIn, only 12% of the workforce is actively looking for jobs, but 85% is open to hearing about new opportunities. Recruitment consultants will be actively looking out for these candidates - over at your competitors’ or the job market. Because they live and breathe recruiting, these head-hunters have the time to identify and reach out to passive candidates in a way that’s probably not possible for your team.
Recruitment agencies can turn a month-long search into one that lasts just a few days. Knowing when and how to use them effectively can not only reduce the stress of recruiting, it can also help you to guarantee a long-term hire.
If you’d like to learn more about working with a recruitment agency, reach out to one of our expert recruiters today.
Supplement your recruitment efforts and increase your in-house recruiter’s/ human resource team’s productivity by working with a recruitment agency.
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