For many years, recruitment was seen as separate from regular business. This was largely due to recruitment being thought of as a necessary evil and a task that needed to be completed to fill desks. However, in today’s uncertain economy, most companies are focused on realising value from every element of their operations. Getting and retaining the highest talent at all levels of business is the number one driver of financial success.
The Essentials of Getting it Right
The disadvantages of using the in-house HR team against an external specialist to source talent are multi-layered. First, your HR team is likely already running to 90 per cent capacity with daily tasks. Introducing recruitment tasks, whether a large drive or the search for an individual, results in the team either diverting resources or completing the task to the capacity available. Diverting resources leads to failings in other business areas, while squeezing the new task in can only produce squeezed results. By outsourcing, your HR department still has a major hand in the task, but the time-consuming tasks of CV sorting and shortlisting are taken in hand.
There are also elements to recruitment that you can’t excel at in-house. Your recruitment specialist is industry- or role-specific and an employment trend expert. The real value-add here is that they know the job and the candidate market. Good recruitment specialists will have years of relationship building with other firms and – just as importantly – working professionals. They know who else is hiring and what they are looking for and offering candidates in terms of compensation packages and company culture. By having this insider information, they can make sure your company becomes a serious player in the hiring market. Likewise, they know what suitable individuals are actively looking for new opportunities and who would be passively interested in your role. This information is not available to your HR team.
Recruitment Technology
While a manager or HR professional is best placed to construct the job specification, the recruiter knows how to translate these requirements into a desirable position. This doesn’t mean being untruthful; it entails highlighting the elements of the job that candidates are currently searching for online.
They are also experts in using predictive analytics to decide who will be the best fit and the right candidate. Hiring new talent is an excellent opportunity for a company to improve its existing talent base, but today’s candidates are just as aware of difficult economic times as their potential employers. This has led to a wave of tutorials on building a CV and making the right impression at the interview stage. To the untrained manager, many of these candidates will appear remarkable. However, analytic technology can separate the wheat from the chaff, ensuring every interviewee is appropriate.
For businesses with their eye on profit and not just on outgoings, outsourcing recruitment to a specialist is a must. Long gone are the days when it was about saving money; now it’s about making money!