MBM Talent Direct

Access the best

If you use a recruitment agency you’re statistically more likely to access the best job-seekers on the market (both active and passive).  People who are actively looking for new positions are more likely to register with agencies.  In addition, most recruitment agencies will position their vacancy adverts on a range of job boards, and they should understand what it takes for that advert to rank highly in candidates’ job searches.  All of this is knowledge that you only get from working in the sector.

Temporary or Temp to Perm

These agencies send in temporary workers who can come and go, or, if you find they’re a good fit, can transfer to your payroll. Their contract can be bought out for a fee, or after a length of time you can have them for free. There’s typically a sliding scale on the buyout: The sooner you take them off the agency payroll and onto yours, the higher the cost.

Specificity

Sometimes, your requirements might be very specific.  They might be so tight, that you need an expert who understands the candidates in your niche and has a database of them to call upon.  In this instance, using a recruitment agency means that only candidates who are fully qualified for the role will be shortlisted for the position.  A recruitment agency will manage the process for you, rejecting any unsuitable candidates and managing any queries about the role, which leads to point 3:

Time saver

Using a recruitment agency will reduce the time and in-house resource that you need to dedicate to recruitment.  It should also lead to a quicker turnaround on filling the vacancies, which in turn leads to increased efficiency of the organisation

Additional services

Recruitment agencies normally offer a range of specialist services such as psychometric tests, to help give you an unique insight into your future hires.  Sourcing these tests independently can be time consuming and expensive as they can be part of the agencies’ service offering.

Sector expertise

Recruitment consultants are experts at screening, filtering and profiling candidates.  Your in-house team might not have the same level of expertise.  Again this leads to time and cost efficiencies in the long run.

Seasonal demand

Another great reason to use a recruitment agency might be to give you flexibility in your recruitment planning to meet cyclical/market demand e.g. holiday cover in busy times such as Christmas.  Temporary recruitment agencies will take a huge amount of the pain and stress away from companies who need quick access to temporary candidates.

Access to national job boards

A recruitment agency will improve the efficiency of a company’s recruitment process through direct access to national job boards.  Negotiating your own job board contracts can be costly and time consuming, and print media is nearly all but dead for job searching purposes, so utilising the right agency’s access to job boards will put you in front of the best candidates on the market.

Shortlisting the best

Recruitment agencies will ordinarily only shortlist the correctly qualified personnel, meaning that you don’t have to.  Again a huge time saver.

Expert sector knowledge

If as a hiring manager you need to get expert opinion about and knowledge of current recruitment legislation, you could make the recruitment agency your first ‘port-of-call’.  The agency should know all the relevant requirements and legalities surrounding the industry they’re in.

Salary benchmarking

If you’ve got a role and you’re unsure what the correct salary is for the position, the recruitment agency is ideally placed to give you an accurate market rate using salary data and local market knowledge.

Cashing in on the Guarantee

In addition to the recruitment help, all agencies offer guarantee periods. If the hire doesn’t work out, you don’t pay and they start the search over, not you. With some agencies you can negotiate on fees, with others guarantee periods; with some both. Never hurts to ask. Particularly if you hire volume through them, or you’re a new customer, definitely try to negotiate either or both. But whatever the guarantee period, using it strictly as a probationary period is critical. If they’re not working out, let the agency start the process over.

If you look back at the turnover you’ve had, how much can be attributed to rushed hires, lack of screening, or settling just to fill that spot? When you use a recruiter you stop making those mistakes on your own, and start making them work in your favor.

Your guarantee period is an opportunity to assure the new hire is the right hire. Set realistic goals for what the new hire should have learned/achieved/mastered within the warranty period. If they aren’t hitting those goals, it’s time to trade. It might take a few tries to get the right match, but you’ve done very little of the work to accomplish that feat: and, as a bonus, the agency learns more about your company. They’ll be better able to fill your next slot once they get a feel for your priorities and culture.

Additional Benefits

If you’re still not convinced on why using a recruitment agency may be the right move, the decision to do so can bring some added benefits that may be difficult to quantify immediately, but are nevertheless very real. For example: Unless you’re Google or Apple, you probably don’t have thousands of qualified candidates lining up to work for you. But a recruiter will “sell” your company to a candidate as strongly as they’ll sell the candidate to you.

Let’s say you’ve finally decided to hire a developer, but your HR staff knows very little about coding. Recruiters who specialize in a certain market can help you come up with fair compensation packages, let you know what you can realistically expect from the marketplace, and, probably most important, introduce you to candidates in their applicant pool who are exactly the right fit.

Using a recruitment agency can be helpful from an accounting standpoint, too. Agency fees are business expenses – which can help your bottom line. According to LinkedIn, only 12 percent of the workforce is actively looking for jobs, but 85 percent is open to hearing about new opportunities. Agency recruiters won’t just wait for a quality candidate to walk in their door – they’ll troll your competitors and the marketplace for people in similar positions, to see if anyone is interested in looking. Because they live and breathe recruiting, agency recruiters have the time to identify and reach out to passive candidates in a way that’s probably just not possible for your team.

Recruitment agencies can turn a month-long search into one that lasts just a few days. Knowing when and how to use them effectively can not only reduce the stress of recruiting, it can help you guarantee a long-term hire.