Collaborating with a staffing agency can be incredibly beneficial for your company. Here’s how an agency can help you find and hire the right candidates.
Recruiting qualified candidates in 2019 is challenging. With unemployment rates dropping to an all-time low, employers are faced with a job seeker’s market. Posting open job positions on job boards won’t suffice to attract the best candidate. Employers need to spend plenty of time and money on making a hire that often turns out not to be a fit for the company.
If you’re in a similar situation, you’re probably thinking about partnering with a recruitment agency. You’ll be happy to hear that working with a staffing agency can shorten the time-consuming hiring process and find you skilled talent faster.
Here are six ways of how a recruitment agency can help your business:
Talent assessment.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the cost of a bad worker is at least 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings. For smaller companies with a limited budget, bad hiring decisions can be a threat to the business.
One significant benefit of working with a staffing agency is that they offer talent assessment services. Candidates are evaluated by several assessors using multiple techniques and tools including HR tests.
A recruitment agency will be responsible for:
- Assessing candidates for their hard and soft skills.
- Screening candidates for culture fit.
- Performing psychometric testing that includes the measurement of knowledge, abilities, attitudes, personality traits, and educational measurement.
By conducting a thorough assessment, an employment agency ensures that they send only the best talent your way. The tests can help employers with employee development, promotion, assessment, and selection.
Some recruitment agencies can help you with 180(Deg.) or 360(Deg.) assessment, also known as multi-source assessment. 180-degree feedback evaluates an employee’s skills by asking their manager, their coworkers, and themselves. A 360-degree feedback instrument additionally includes an assessment from customers, direct reports, and bosses. The benefit of such a tool is that people are not always accurate in evaluating their own skills.
An agency can also help with skills mapping. They can assist with:
- Identifying employees’ strengths and weaknesses.
- Analyzing an employee’s suitability for a position.
- Targeting deficits of the employees’ competencies for the role they have.
- Highlighting skills that need additional training.
Promotion of new roles.
You might be looking to fill a specific senior position at your company. You’ve received tons of applications but not a single qualified candidate. You start to wonder whether your job ad reached the right audience.
In the majority of cases, employers struggle to locate skilled talent due to poor marketing strategy. Working with a recruitment agency can help you be sure your open job position reaches the right candidates.
An agency will advertise the vacancy across social media. Recruitment consultants might also directly contact candidates who might be a perfect fit for the role. Many professionals might not be looking for a new job, but your vacancy could attract their attention.
Salary negotiation.
How many times have you found your ideal talent and made a job offer only to find out that they expect a higher salary than you can provide? Working with a staffing agency can help prevent this scenario from taking place.
Apart from a candidate’s skills and availability, recruitment agencies have insight into a candidate’s salary expectations. They can negotiate on behalf of your company and agree on a mutually acceptable salary and benefits package.
Once the salary expectation problem is resolved, you can proceed with the interview process with confidence that you will seal the deal.
Interview assistance.
Interviews involve a heavy time commitment. Usually, they last for 45 minutes to an hour, which is the amount of time it takes for the interviewer to get to know the candidate better. However, if you don’t have an in-house recruitment team, you’ll be left with dealing with the interviews yourself. Instead of focusing on your core business, you’ll be wasting hours and hours on interviews.
This is where an employment agency can come in handy. Not only that the agency will identify skilled talent, but they will also conduct interviews on an employer’s behalf. The first thing they will do is conduct a quick phone interview to ensure the candidate matches the job description.
Once they eliminate unsuitable candidates, they will proceed with doing a background check on the candidates that were invited for an interview. The agency can also take care of the final round of interviews. Recruiters know the best interview questions to ask to ensure your company is making a smart hiring decision.
Faster hiring.
Will you be surprised if I told you that only 30% of companies are able to fill a role within 30 days? The remaining companies take anywhere between 1–4 months to make a hire!
If you decide to work with an employment agency, you stand a higher chance of shortening the time needed to fill your open job positions. Instead of rushing to complete the hiring process, an agency will do everything for you, including:
- Screening resumes.
- Communicating with candidates.
- Conducting initial interviews.
- Negotiating a salary.
A recruitment agency has vast networks of vetted candidates that they can contact with an offer. They have insight into those candidates’ skills and abilities, as well as salary expectations. You will manage to hire qualified candidates in a shorter time and focus your attention on more pressing matters.
Specialist knowledge.
A staffing agency’s main job is to stay up-to-date with the latest news and developments in the industry.
They work, day and night, with companies across different niches, starting from accounting and finance to technology and healthcare.
They’ll be informed about salary benchmarks in a specific industry, skills shortage, candidate surplus, candidate expectations, etc.
Employers can incorporate a recruitment agency’s expertise and jobs market insight into their recruitment strategy. They have the competence to guide you through the hiring process and advise you on how to improve it in the long run.
Key Takeaways
Hiring skilled talent is challenging, but you don’t have to do it alone. A staffing agency can help you find high-quality candidates more efficiently and fill your open positions faster.
Your company will get the chance to access the talent it needs, in a short time, cost-effectively. You can invest the money and time you’ll save in driving the business forward.
Make sure you find a good one!
