Should you find new talent by using your in-house team or by hiring a recruiting firm? During today’s candidate drought, many employers and hiring managers find themselves wondering how to correctly answer this question.
On one hand, many small businesses don’t have the people or the resources to dedicate solely to recruiting. They believe the best option for them financially is to hand the task off to an HR professional, other employees, and even to the owner of the company. However, when you add up all the hours it takes to recruit a top employee and time spent away from other critical work, then you’re losing out on revenue and productivity.
Also, while these people may be extremely good at what they do, they don’t have the expertise needed to recruit and hire top talent.
On the other hand, as it gets harder and harder to hire talented employees, more companies are hiring a recruiting firm to help them fill their open positions. More than half of the companies plan to increase their use of staffing firms over the five years, according to the 2018 Staffing Buyer Guide.
In fact, partnering with recruiting firms will help curb the hiring process and attract candidates with specialized skills, according to the hiring managers surveyed in the study.
If you’re still unsure about how hiring a recruiting firm can help you find better talent and save you more money than using your internal team, then keep reading below.
SUSTAINED AND DEDICATED EFFORT
Even if you have a dedicated HR team at your company, these professionals are busy with general HR administrative functions, managing employee relations, and coordinating benefits and payroll. Recruiting top talent is part of the mix too, but not a committed and ongoing task. This is the same for employees you assign to help recruit new candidates. Not only do they have to complete their current job tasks and functions, but they now have to figure out how to fit recruiting into their workday too. Either the employee will be stretched too thin to complete the recruiting tasks, or their current work will suffer instead.
Using a recruiting firm means that your employees can now focus their time and effort to completing important projects and assignments, and not have to worry about fitting recruiting tasks into their workday. Many companies believe they can handle recruiting by offloading these tasks onto current employees, but the problem is that recruiting is a sustained effort and can’t be done part-time. Top candidates are off the market in ten days so it takes a dedicated resource to stay in from of these people and keep them engaged.
RECRUITING EXPERTISE
Do you want the person finding top talent for your company to be an expert or just have a general idea of how to recruit? This is the difference between hiring a recruiting firm and using your current employees to find top talent.
Recruiting firms focus all of their attention and daily efforts towards recruiting and placing top candidates, so they have a certain level of expertise and authority when it comes to finding top talent.
In fact, two-thirds of hiring managers said they feel that using a staffing firm gives them access to the right candidates, according to the 2018 Staffing Buyer Study.
Also, the Staffing study found that companies are often hesitant about hiring a recruiting firm because they believe the firms don’t hire for the type of positions needed. However, there are many recruiting firms that specialize in certain industries or fields that can help you with difficult or specific searches.
Just as you wouldn’t have a sales rep in charge of payroll, you shouldn’t have people in charge of recruiting who aren’t familiar with the industry.
DISCRETION
An ideal situation for hiring a recruiting firm is when you need discretion. For example, you have an employee who is not performing and you need to get a replacement hired while they’re still working at the company.
It is possible to use internal resources to find someone, but when it’s such a confidential search, it’s best not to risk people finding out about the replacement. Also, it makes the job of recruiting extremely difficult for the internal team. Simple tasks like posting the open job on your company website become complicated. When using a recruiting firm, they can keep the name of the company confidential and post the job on different job boards under the recruitment company’s name.
SHORTER HIRING PROCESS
It’s very rare to have the perfect candidate to apply to your open position directly. Oftentimes, it takes a lot of sourcing, strategy, and active reach outs to find an amazing candidate who is interested in your job opening. Unfortunately, this strategy takes a lot of time and a sustained effort to complete.
Recruiting firms have professionals whose only job is to source top candidates. Recruiting companies also have tools and technology that help them monitor and stay in touch with pre-screened, talented professionals. Having access to this type of candidate pool helps the recruiting process move quickly and efficiently.
ACCESS TO CONTRACTORS
Many small businesses are using contractors to supplement different parts of their business. In fact, 95 percent of businesses view non-employee workers as a key element for developing and running a successful business, according to a study from Fieldglass.
If you need contract employees, most agencies have a ready pool of talent to pull from, and since they do this all the time, they can quickly find you a candidate. Of course, an in-house team could also search for contract talent, but then you run into a whole new set of problems and risk when hiring contract employees. Many companies will get in trouble by improperly calling employees contractors and it may look like you’re trying to skirt overtime laws and regulations by calling employees contractors. Using an external firm to hire contractors eliminates your liability and the risk of the government coming to audit you.
Many companies think they can save money by using an in-house team to recruit top candidates, but it often creates more chaos, stress, and turnover than using an outside firm. Before hiring your next candidate, consider the pros and cons of hiring an outside recruiting firm to assist in your small business hiring. Giving your employees extra work, not using experts, and not having a dedicated resource to lead your recruiting strategy can all contribute to wasted time and money.
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