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The Hidden Costs of NOT Using a Recruitment Agency
July 31, 2020
Recruiting new IT talent, as well as those who work on Business Transformation projects, can be a costly and time-consuming process for organisations to tackle, taking up significant time and resources without any guarantee of success. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. Using a specialist Recruitment Agency to source the right talent and negotiate terms can relieve a lot of pressure, as well as negate the numerous hidden costs of taking recruitment on yourself. Before embarking on any recruitment project, take a look at our list of the hidden costs to ensure you’re making the right choice on whether to go it alone or not.
The Hidden Costs of Doing it Yourself
Advertising on job boards is not the only expense involved with recruitment – candidate attraction comes with a number of other hidden costs:
Administration
Keeping the hiring process in-house means someone within your business will need to be overseeing it. Posting the job ad is only the beginning; there are many other tasks involved, including writing the job description, launching the advertising campaign, handling applications, phone screening candidates, responding to emails, conducting interviews and checking backgrounds and references. This admin burden is not only going to take up a lot of time for the person responsible but may also distract them from other important work – the work that they would’ve been doing if they’d not been handed accountability for recruitment – and lower productivity.
It’s no secret that the recruitment process is a lengthy one, and saving time is one of the main reasons why employers use a recruitment agency. It takes all the hassle out of the task, ensuring that the employer is able to focus on what’s important for them: running their business.
Negotiation
It’s important to remember that even once you’ve found the perfect candidate for your role, there are still a number of steps to complete. Most significantly, the offer stage.
In order to secure your ideal IT candidate or someone that has experience working on Business Transformation, it’s important to pitch the right offer the first time. However, not having access to expert advice on market salary rates and how best to manage the offer process, can result in inflated salaries.
On the other hand, if you end up making an offer that’s below market value due to a lack of wider market knowledge, then you may lose out on your chosen candidate. In addition, making an offer that is too low can also have a negative impact on your brand, as candidates may perceive your organisation as one that is out of touch or isn’t willing to pay “what it takes”. Having an expert on hand to ensure the offer isn’t either too high or too low is therefore a considerable benefit of using a recruitment agency, both in terms of securing the right candidate and safeguarding your reputation.
Brand
The quality of the interaction with candidates during the hiring process can have a significant effect on your employer brand. Responding to unsuccessful applicants is time-consuming but failing to do so can leave people with a bad impression. It’s not just common courtesy – it’s important to ensure all applicants feel that their time and effort is appreciated.
Similarly, a slow hiring process is a key source of frustration for many candidates. Whether you take too long to review CVs or there is too much time between interviewing and feedback, repeated delays or periods without contact will only serve to repel candidates. A recruitment agency can handle this contact for you and ensure that each candidate is being given the attention they require, protecting your brand as well as making for a more efficient process.
Agencies can also provide a buffer between a company and the marketplace, shielding your brand from vocal candidates who have more channels than ever to express frustration through social media and online forums.
Making a rushed decision
Finally but possibly the most important, what is the cost if you hire the wrong person because of a rushed or ineffective hiring process?
When addressing issues with problematic employees, management often has to put in additional hours as a result, to fix the situation. Whether it’s guiding a new employee, or looking into strategies to turn performance around, it’s easy to become frustrated when good progress isn’t being made. This can lead to manager burn out and risk the loss of quality talent because of one person in the team that perhaps, shouldn’t have been hired in the first place.
Why Use a Recruitment Agency?
Specialist Approach to Talent
One of biggest benefits of using a specialist IT recruitment agency is that they have an extensive knowledge of the IT market (and candidates that work on Business Transformation) at their disposal. It is a recruitment consultant’s job to keep up-to-date with the latest trends, developments and current affairs of the industry they’re recruiting in. Consequently, they serve as a trusted resource for their clients throughout the hiring process, providing them with valuable insights on a variety of key issues, including skill shortages and market salary rates.
Recruitment agencies also allow access to more, higher quality candidates than many businesses are able to source alone. Gone are the days where a short ad in the newspaper will do the trick; engaging candidates today means using a range of mediums. This is why specialist recruiters use a combination of job boards, social media and network referrals, ensuring that a thorough examination of the talent market has taken place before moving forward with candidates. This approach is often necessary to reach a solid pool of IT talent, and naturally this tends to yield better results when a hire is made.
Leveraging Relationships
At the end of the day, however, recruitment is all about relationships. It’s here where recruitment agencies already have a clear head start, as they can tap into an established talent pipeline filled with both active and passive candidates. This means getting your role in front of candidates that aren’t presently looking on job boards, which is a big advantage considering active jobseekers make up just a fraction of the available talent, and passive candidates tend to be of a higher quality.
Recruitment consultants also build up strong relationships with their clients, which makes for significantly better hiring outcomes. By getting to know a business inside-out, your consultant will understand your organisation like you do and be able to find candidates who are not only a skills match, but a culture match too. Furthermore, the more you work with your recruiter and build up that relationship, the better of an understanding you’ll have and the better results you’ll see.
Summary
Perhaps most importantly, employers who are working with Recruiters don’t need to worry about the possibility of having to repeat the process if the right person isn’t found on the first attempt. All of the above advantages come together to ensure a greater probability of the right person being found first time.
Building an ongoing relationship with a specialist recruitment agency will see you benefit from experts who not only know your market inside-out but have access to an extensive pool of the market’s top IT talent, along with those who have worked in Business Transformation.
To discuss your internal recruitment process in more detail, or for support in your upcoming IT recruitment, get in touch with us.
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