One of the best things you can do for your recruitment efforts is to work with a recruitment agency in your industry niche. Recruitment agencies work to find candidates a job that best aligns with their career goals, and work to find businesses that candidate that is the best fit for their individual business.
Just how recruitment agencies work is no secret, in fact we’ve written about how recruitment agencies work here, to clear up any confusion.
And while we may be biased on that, we wanted to offer an unbiased view on some of the advantages and disadvantages of working with a recruitment agency. So you can decide what’s best for your business and your hiring needs.
5 Advantages of Working With a Recruitment Agency
Today we’ll be concentrating on the biggest advantages and disadvantages of working with a recruitment agency. But let’s start with 5 of the reasons why you should at least consider if working with a recruiter or recruitment agency is right for your business.
1. You Don’t Pay Anything Until You’re Happy With Your New Hire
The majority of recruitment agencies offer (and the way we work for some of our clients here at Dynamic) work on a contingency basis. This means that working with the recruiter costs you, the business, nothing until you choose to hire a candidate that the recruiter has found for you.
This means that the recruiter is heavily incentivised to find you a candidate not just quickly, but one that beats the competition and is the best for the job. Because the recruitment company and the recruiter aren’t paid until they do.
Some businesses opt to use ‘contingency based recruitment’ for their initial recruitment efforts, making sure they’re happy with the quality of candidates the recruitment agency finds for them before switching to ‘retained recruitment’ or putting them on a PSL (Preferred Supplier List).
For more information on how recruitment agencies make money, you can read our complete guide here.
2. It Saves You Massive Amounts of Time and Effort
Recruitment can take months to find the right candidate, and hundreds of hours for your business: sourcing candidates, screening CVs, interviewing, decision making, offers, counter offers…
The average interview process is around 24 for the IT industry, rising as high as 34 days for Solutions Architects and IT Managers. And this only counts for once the interviewing process has begun and doesn’t count the initial process of drafting a job advert, posting it on various job boards and screening all the applicants. So it’s no surprise that businesses turn to outside experts who can help support their recruitment efforts.
And to get to this point is a mountain of work as well. A study from Zippia shows that the average job advert gets 118 applicants. Which means 118 CVs to sort through, with 20% (24) of these applicants making it to the interview stage.
Meanwhile here at Dynamic we screen applicants for you, so you don’t have to make decisions on 100’s of CVs. For an average successful placement, we send 5 CVs, with 4 of those receiving an interview and one of them being offered the job.
So if you’re in the IT industry and looking for your next hire, by working with us you can save yourself hundreds of working hours, which has other advantages such as…
3. A Faster Hiring Process Has Far Reaching Benefits
The less time you have to spend on the interview process means the more time you have to grow your business in other ways. If your senior members of staff are involved in the interviewing process, reducing the amount of interviews you conduct this leaves them open to focus on other important areas: Such as new business acquisitions or the training and development of existing and new members of the team.
And you also have to consider the costs to the business of NOT having someone when you need them. Other benefits of having the role filled as quickly as possible include:
- Reducing the need to outsource work to potentially expensive freelancers or contractors.
- Meaning your team is running as full capacity again quicker, meaning project deadlines are met and clients are less likely to leave.
- Reducing the stress and workload on your team, meaning they will be less likely to leave as well.
4. Working With Recruitment Experts Can Reduce The Risk of Bad Hires
One of the biggest worries for any hiring manager is bad hires. Studies have shown that a bad hire can cost up to 30% of an employee’s wages for the first year. Which is just the financial cost, and doesn’t take into account the amount of time that is invested and wasted on bad hires.
Working with a recruiter can reduce the risk of making bad hires because we work with a larger network of candidates. We don’t just rely on active job seekers as we work proactively for our clients and go out searching for candidates who didn’t apply, or are passively seeking their next role.
And while a candidate may inflate their experience and skills in an interview when under pressure, we find out the extent of their technical skills and experience before the candidate even makes it to the interview stage. Similarly we will screen a candidate to make sure their values align with your company culture.
5. A Recruitment Agency Has a Larger Network of Candidates Than You
Unless you’re a huge, international business with a massive, pre-existing network of IT professionals, you’re not going to have as much reach as a boutique recruitment agency. For example, our recruitment consultants have pre-existing relationships with their network of IT Professionals that they have been working with for years.
No matter the area of Network, Infrastructure, Cyber Security, IT Sales, perm or contract you’re looking for: we’ve got an established consultant that is an expert in their niche with an established network that they can already reach out to.
5 Disadvantages of Working With a Recruitment Agency
Despite all these positives, there are some things you should consider before reaching out to a recruitment agency. Because while we (unbiasedly) would recommend at least having a conversation with a recruitment consultant to see if they can support your recruitment efforts, it may not be right for everyone.
1. You Are Putting Your Trust in a Recruiter to Sell the Role and Sell Your Company
Working with a recruitment agency requires a level of trust in them to not only sell the position, but sell your company as a whole. A lot of this comes down to the level of communication from the outset. But it also relies on the recruiters knowledge of your industry. A recruiter can’t sell a job to a candidate that they don’t understand themselves. And given how complicated the nature of IT work can be, this can be difficult for a recruitment agency.
Which is why we recommend working with a recruitment agency that is specific to your niche. These are recruiters who have years of experience recruiting in, and understanding, your industry.
2. It Can Be Cheaper to Use Your own Internal Recruitment Team
Despite how much working with a recruitment agency can save you money, there is still a cost to consider. And if you’re hiring a lot of people and continually looking to expand, those costs will add up. It may be in your best interests to build out your own in-house team of experts who can cut down costs in the long run.
One way to cut down costs is to choose a recruitment agency that suits your hiring needs. Whether that’s ‘contingency recruitment’, where you only pay when you’re happy with the results and don’t pay for the recruiters’ time: Or ‘retained recruitment’ where a company is paid a fee to work exclusively for you and to support your hiring needs.
3. There’s no Guarantee the Recruitment Agency Will Find the Right Candidate
Despite exhausting all your efforts, depending on the positions you’re hiring for there are sometimes just no available candidates on the market who meet your criteria. And then it can feel like a waste of time working with the recruitment agency.
But a recruitment agency doesn’t have to be a replacement for your own recruitment efforts. In fact, they’re often best used alongside your own internal recruiter, so you can use the quality of candidates you’re being sent as a benchmark for what is out on the market. If you’re being sent candidates that aren’t as qualified for the position as the ones you’re finding, you’re probably best off working with a different recruiter.
But despite this we are still experts in IT recruitment. What we can also do, is offer you advice on how to be more successful in your own search. We can inform you on market value, what matters most to the candidates you are looking for, and what you can expect to receive for what you’re offering.
4. You Need to be Committed and Invest Time Into the Process
Working with a recruitment agency can save you massive amounts of time searching for your new employee. However, you do need to have the time to invest into the recruiter to make sure they’re sending you the right people.
You need to have the initial time to commit to the process in helping the recruiter understand your business, your business needs and who exactly you’re looking for.
And once the search is underway, you need to have the time to give feedback to CVs you are sent and give prompt interview feedback to candidates. Otherwise you can safely expect to have the recruiter calling you regularly for feedback.
But we would argue that as working with a recruitment agency can save you time in the long run, if you don’t have the time to commit to a partnership, you may not have the time to recruit in the first place.
5. You Need to Have a Clear and Communicable Idea of Your Company Culture
A candidate can tell when someone tries to sell them a role or a business that they don’t fully understand themselves. Which is why we take the time and ask the questions to understand your business needs and company culture.
But what this does take is a strong level of communication from the start. Otherwise the recruiter will waste time searching for the wrong candidates and you will waste time interviewing people who aren’t right for your business.
Here at Dynamic we work hard to remove the negatives of working with a recruitment agency: We ask the right questions at the start of the process to reduce the time you need to invest in the process, we screen our applicants heavily so you only see applicants that you would consider hiring, and we always offer expert advice to our clients to improve their hiring efforts.
If this sounds like something that would be right for your business, have a look here for more information on the advantages of working with a recruitment agency, and get in touch.