You’ve just received a call from a recruitment agency who is offering their services to your company. They’re making bold claims about previous placement success and throwing around words like ‘exclusivity’ and ‘premium candidates’. A few questions probably start running through your mind about whether going through a recruiter when a job becomes vacant is a smart idea. Are recruiters overrated? Is it worth the investment when you could just do it yourself? Do the benefits really outweigh the costs?
We’re going to bring some clarity to the value of engaging a recruiter in the recruitment process and explain why it’s important to work to your strengths and outsource wisely.
Finding Proactive Time in Your Day is a Mission
It’s widely known in the business world that time is one of your most valuable assets. Your time is often divided up between proactive time (driving activities through your own energy) and reactive time (reacting to external forces or people; demands for attention from employees, stakeholders, customers, etc). Finding time in your day to be proactive is often a difficult task and even more so when a position in your team opens up that needs to be filled.
The recruitment process is an extremely proactive undertaking. It requires delving into copious amounts of resumes, interviews, reference checking, and more interviews. The job of a recruiter is to do almost all this work for you, find out your specific desires and requirements, and then provide you with the top candidates for you to pick from, rather than an endless pile of eager job seekers who don’t have the qualifications that match the job in the first place.
Expertise and Niche
Recruiters are constantly working to identify the best talent in the market, often before you have a vacancy. Recruitment is where they live and work day in and day out. Whether candidates are active, passive or hidden, recruiters have engaged databases that are constantly being replenished and refined for the exact roles you will be looking to hire for. They are up-to-date with the market, unbiased in regards to workplace politics and are targeted to specific areas within your business which ensures the knowledge of role requirements and the ability to find the best people in the market for your company.
Speed
With staff conditions, salaries and other concerns besides the hiring process, locating the best talent can be a lengthy process. If you need to fill a position quickly, working with a recruiter is highly valuable. With candidates at the ready, specific to the roles you are looking for, recruiters can have temp and contract roles filled in just a few days.
If you think about the hiring process as similar to the process of catching fish, a professional fisherman is always going to catch more fish than a hobby fisherman who gets out once a month. Recruiters are in the marketplace every day talking with clients and candidates, tracking movement in different industries and understanding the desired career paths of various candidates. They know the ‘best places to fish’ and the right times to do it if you will. This will always mean a deeper engagement and wider catch of candidates than any online ad or applicant databases. At Abacus Huma Capital, only about 8% of placed candidates are actually from an online job ad.
It’s Low-Risk
Hiring a recruiter can seem like a big investment, however, it’s one that comes with very little risk. The beauty of a recruiter is that they do the legwork for you, provide you with the top candidates, and only require payment when you have filled the position with your preferred candidate. You won’t pay for what you do not get. As previously mentioned, the money and time this saves in searching for candidates, wading through resumes and rounds of unsuccessful interviews is significant and ensures you have the best possible employees. That is a process worth investing into. To read about how to retain your star employees once you have them, click here.
It Comes with a Replacement Guarantee
In the event you hire someone who leaves shortly after commencing for whatever reason, most recruitment firms will offer to find another candidate for you at no additional cost. If the process is managed properly from the onset, the risk of this happening is greatly reduced but unfortunately, sometimes things do go wrong, or people’s situations change. Please refer to your recruitment firm’s guarantee period to know how long it is relevant.
If you are an Accounting/Finance Professional interested in exploring new opportunities in the Brisbane market we’d love to hear from you on (07) 3135 9780. I also encourage you to join our private LinkedIn network Accounting & Finance Professionals in Brisbane (click here). As you probably are aware we do move quite quickly on the roles we recruit for so it pays to stay ahead of the competition. Our group is an exclusive community I am building up for Finance Professionals in Brisbane who want to share job search opportunities, industry news, blogs and other content. You’ll also have an opportunity to network with each other. You might even come across some people you have worked with in the past!
