Great employees make great companies. That’s why top organizations are keen on hiring the best talents. However, finding the right person is like finding a needle in a haystack. Some estimates suggest that the cost of hiring can cost up to $40,000. While this might look implausible, when you factor in advertising costs, hours spent reviewing, interviewing, and even conducting background checks, the loss of productivity quickly accounts for it.
In the past decade, more organizations are beginning to make use of recruiting agencies for their hiring process. Why? Because it makes for a wise investment of resources. If you don’t have a dedicated in-house recruiter, then the recruiting process detracts from the time and efficiency of other staff involved. This post explores why it is good to work with recruiters.
Gain Easy Access to the Best Talents
A recruiting agency has only one major role: finding candidates perfectly suited for their clients (which in this case is your company). Through their robust network, they have access to active job seekers, both those that are currently unemployed and those looking for better opportunities.
But how do they develop this robust network? First, candidates looking for new jobs are more likely to register with a reputable recruiter. Furthermore, recruiters place job vacancies for multiple positions for their many clients. Consequently, they have access to lots of potential talents.
Recruiters further have systems and procedures in place that help them filter out the candidates that are a more suited fit for your organization. As a result, you get to interview only highly qualified candidates.
Faster Hiring
According to a Harvard study, a vacant position costs a company two to three times the salary for that role. To drastically cut down this cost, companies have to not only fill roles with the best candidates but also fill them promptly.
Recruitment agencies help you take care of the initial hiring stages. This includes sifting through resumes and applications and filtering out candidates worth considering. To put things in perspective, imagine that a company wants to fill in a vacant role and 75 candidates apply. If it takes about 4 to 5 minutes to review each application, about 6 hours is needed to review everything. Based on several studies, over half of the people that apply for a role are unqualified. That’s 3 hours wasted reviewing unqualified candidates. If you use a recruiting agency, you won’t waste that time.
The independent recruiter you hire will also manage administrative tasks like communicating with successful and unsuccessful candidates, as well as carrying out comprehensive background checks. Ultimately, this means you will have a quicker turnaround filling vacancies.
They Provide Additional Services
As any savvy employer knows, hiring entails more than just finding a qualified candidate after the interview. You also have to verify their credentials, experience, and more. This is crucial given that about 36 percent of Americans lie on their resumes, while a lot more exaggerate.
Recruitment agencies ensure that the candidates did what they claimed to do on their resumes. This is accomplished through rigorous background checks, which typically include education verification, reference checks, driving records, credit history checks, and other relevant checks.
Some recruiting agencies also offer a wide range of services including psychometric tests, executive search, contract, and permanent recruitment, and many others. Ensure that you look at these additional services so you can choose a recruitment agency perfectly suited to meet your needs.
Tap into their Market Knowledge
Recruitment agencies have a robust knowledge of the market that can prove immensely valuable to you on several occasions.
First, they are perfectly suited for hiring for a specialized or executive role. If your internal recruiters have never hired for a specialized role before or maybe a newly created role, they’ll have to dedicate lots of time and effort to get acquainted with what to look out for. Even after this happens, there’s no guarantee that they’ll get the best candidate for the job. On the other hand, recruiting agencies hire for a vast array of roles, so chances are they’ve hired for a position similar to what you’re looking to fill. A recruiting agency brings knowledge of specialized skills, niche job boards, and unique sourcing methods.
Furthermore, if you have a job position available with an uncertain salary, a recruiting agency can provide insight into market rates using salary data websites like Glassdoor, Indeed, and PayScale. They can even use their local market knowledge to give rate ranges for a role in a specific locale.
Besides, recruiting agencies can help you frame your job posting in a way that is highly competitive to attract the very best. This includes deciding the ideal pay, bonuses, and other motivating factors. This makes you more likely to hire the best hires.
Finally, expert recruiters can advise you on alternative solutions in a situation that you’re struggling to find quality candidates for specific roles.
Financial Savings
Saving costs is a great way for companies to improve efficiency and increase profitability. By hiring on your own, you tend to spend way more. From the very start, placing single one-off jobs with advertising agencies can be expensive. On the other hand, recruitment agencies are on all the top job boards and can easily place your offer.
As we’ve identified earlier, sifting through resumes, conducting interviews, conducting background checks, and more, not only cost time, but also money. Also, when negotiating with potential hires, you might settle for more than what’s fair. With a recruitment agency, all these costs are minimized. At the end of the day, you get the best candidate in the shortest possible time at a fair cost.
Costs saved by working with a recruitment agency include:
- Elimination of job posting fees.
- Other in-house staff doesn’t have to sacrifice their productivity to fill the new role.
- Quicker hiring reduces overtime costs.
- Highly qualified hires contribute maximally to your company, thereby boosting profitability.
- By hiring well-qualified candidates, you spend less on training costs.
