How Recruitment Firms Enhance Your Recruitment Strategy

As a business leader, you already know how important your employees are to your company’s overall success. The right talent can bring critical expertise and knowledge to the table, and a cohesive team can boost efficiency and productivity exponentially.

But hiring the right people is tougher than you think. According to a recent CareerBuilder survey, nearly 75 percent of employers report having hired the wrong person in the past — and according to this same study, just one bad hire can cost employers an average of $17,000! Those same employers also reported how just one bad hire caused productivity and team morale to take a nosedive. Simply put, hiring the right person the first time matters — not just to your bottom line, but to your team and customers, too.

Recruitment takes time and expertise, so if you’ve had trouble in the past finding the right people for your company, now might be the time to get some outside help. Enter the talent recruitment firm that can save your company money, time and frustration in the search for the right hires.

Curious how recruitment agencies can help upgrade your talent pool? Check out these 5 ways staffing firms can help level up your company’s talent in a big way.

Experienced recruitment firms can get a clearer picture of candidates’ aptitudes.

It’s a common misconception that staffing firms focus primarily on generalized roles, but a small minority of agencies can bring an exceptional level of knowledge and insight to specialized recruitment efforts, too. They do so by combining the most effective assessment tools to paint a clear and cohesive picture of a candidate’s aptitude, skill set and job performance potential.

While your company may be able to utilize best practices in recruiting and screening independently, you must build in repeatable processes in order for this to be sustainable. More often than not, it’s best for a company’s HR team to instead focus on core responsibilities such as benefits administration and the like. Plus, combining multiple assessment tools and strategies also reduces bias and error while creating a more cohesive and complete profile of a candidate — something that only staffing firms equipped with the right assessment tools can do.

Outsourcing these types of assessments empowers your company to focus in on a candidate’s specialized skills and abilities to determine if someone is the right fit before they’ve even walked through your doors.

<h2?Recruitment firms can connect the dots between highly-qualified candidates and your hiring manager.

According to a recent survey by the Society of Human Resource Management, the average cost per hire is just over $4,000, while the average time to fill a position in the United States is about 29 days (even longer for specialized positions). With unemployment rates expected to fall to record lows over the next few months and years, it’s likely to get even tougher to find the right candidates.

That’s where recruitment firms can close a critical gap in the recruitment process. Rather than spending time and money posting open positions to LinkedIn, Indeed and other job sites, companies that utilize the talents and networks of recruitment firms can drastically reduce this time and cost overall. That’s because recruitment firms already have pools of highly-qualified job seekers from which they can select candidates, as well as recruitment processes that are optimized for speed and effectiveness.

Even if your company has a dedicated recruiter or HR manager, staffing agencies can streamline your recruitment strategy and fast-track the hiring process so you can get back to work with the right people on your team.

Recruitment firms can help companies quickly and effectively complete large volume recruitment efforts.

Hiring just one employee can be time-consuming and challenging for even the most experienced HR manager, so naturally the prospect of hiring a large group of people (often within a very short time) is exponentially more difficult. Add in the fact that the average high-volume job posting attracts about 250 applicants, and the prospect of large volume hiring is daunting for even the most experienced HR manager.

Screening applicants within a large pool is perhaps one of the toughest tasks in a hiring manager’s job, which is why recruitment firms can be the difference between a high-volume hiring headache and a smooth-sailing recruitment strategy. Recruitment firms already have the tools available to automate the most time-consuming parts of candidate screening, making it easier for your team to focus on the most qualified candidates without having to invest in expensive software that you might not need on a regular basis.

When it comes to high-volume recruiting, speed and efficiency is key to saving money in the long run.

Recruitment firms can help you assess your candidates’ alignment with company culture.

According to employers surveyed by CareerBuilder in late 2016, about 51% of bad hires were deemed as such because of their inability to work well with other employees. In fact, researchers at the University of Iowa found that hiring candidates that fit with your company’s culture boosts job satisfaction, performance and even the length of tenure with an organization.

Simply put, culture matters — but rarely do organizations have the tools or strategies necessary for determining a candidate’s cultural fit. Even fewer internal HR teams have methods for determining cultural fit during initial screening processes, leading hiring managers to waste time bringing poorly-matched candidates in for interviews.

To fix the problem, many experience recruitment firms have specialized screening processes and programs to determine cultural fit even before a candidate is invited in to meet with hiring managers. Consequently, companies that work with recruitment agencies can spend more time with candidates that possess technical qualifications as well as interpersonal skills necessary to be successful within a role.

Recruitment firms can lessen the load on overworked HR managers.

Human Resource managers might be skilled at selecting and screening candidates for particular roles, but this isn’t their only responsibility. HR managers are routinely expected to recruit for open positions, manage current employees’ concerns and needs, develop strategies to enhance team morale and even assist in payroll and other administrative tasks.

When you add it all up, HR managers are lucky to get out of the office on time every day, and might feel pressured to cut corners in their recruitment efforts in order to meet expectations in other areas of their job. But since a recruitment firm stays laser-focused on hiring, HR managers can provide critical insight and company knowledge without sinking hours into job posting and interview scheduling.

The bottom line:

Attracting, recruiting and hiring highly-qualified employees for your company is challenging — but the rewards are numerous when done right. Common recruitment pitfalls like hiring the wrong cultural fit, overlooking key competencies and missing out on promising candidates can be avoided with the help of a recruitment agency — and can save your company time and money, and ultimately boost revenue and performance.

Don’t leave your recruitment efforts to chance. Before upgrading your company’s talent, reach out to an experienced recruitment agency like LINK that has a proven track record of finding the right people for the right jobs. You’ll be glad you did!