Regardless of the size of the company or how many people it needs to hire at a particular stage of its growth, bringing in an external recruitment agency becomes necessary because of three key factors:
- The hiring company’s image.
- The effectiveness of the selection process.
- Financial factors.
The company’s image
Impartiality
Very often, through our own employees, friends and acquaintances, we receive CVs along with pressure from people who want to “place” their children or friends in our company, on the grounds that they are the best candidates for a company “as strong and well established as ours”.
And very often we’re sure that the candidate being offered to us is not our best option. Yet saying no to whoever passed us the CV can lead to anger, demotivation, the loss of an important customer or an annoyed supplier our business depends on.
Hiring an outside firm gets you out of these awkward commitments and avoids the damage to your image with candidates who arrive with “a godfather”. With an external agency, you can always say that “they were the ones who spared your company a poor candidate”.
Effectiveness of the selection process
These firms are fully dedicated to finding the best talent. They know the best candidates and always have them on their books, having already seen and vetted them in other selection processes.
They know many active profiles; it’s simply a matter of giving them our profile in as much detail as possible, and they will search for it in their large database. Efficiency also comes from the fact that these firms do the heavy work of searching for and shortlisting candidates. We, as the owners of the company, get to choose our candidate from among the best.
What’s more, if we’re not satisfied with the selected candidate during the trial period agreed with the agency, it may refund the cost of the selection or present more candidates.
Costs
For each position we offer, the agency usually presents a shortlist of three possible employees. And for each candidate they present, they have to see a large number of applicants to find the best options.
The time and staff it would cost us to find and screen so many candidates would be endless, whereas the agency bears the costs of searching, shortlisting, running the selection process and presenting the candidates.
Featured image: Mtaylor848, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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