Most companies employ the services of an outside recruitment agency at some point, but many recruiters switch between using a recruitment consultant and handling their own hiring process in-house with no real rhyme or reason. There are pros and cons to both methods of recruiting new staff, so what is best for you?
Of course the only way to be sure is to test both methods, empirically, and really analyse the results. For some the time it takes to screen the Cvs will be a real eye-opener and will make you decide to call a recruitment consultant from the off next time. For others the chance to unearth great recruits along the way and potentially build a pipeline of talent will make the time spent a fantastic investment.
So there simply is no definitive answer to the question. But if you're on the fence and cannot decide, here is the tale of the tape.
Recruitment Consultant
Expertise
Recruitment consultants fill vast numbers of vacancies, so inevitably can find the right candidates in a hurry and know where to go, especially if they are industry specialists.
Resources
Recruitment consultants are set up to weed out Cvs quickly and efficiently, which can serious man hours off your hands and free you up to focus on the very best candidates from a vast amount of initial applicants.
Recruitment companies also have the necessary software like Broadbean, a multi-poster advertising system that collects and grades applications, and dedicated applicant tracking systems that allows the recruitment consultant to track applicants, invite them to interviews, collate feedback, grade them and manage the whole process efficiently. This is simply too big an investment in terms of capital outlay and the time required to exploit the software for most small companies.
Process Management
As well as having access to the software packages, recruitment consultants also know how to exploit them and manage the process. This means that every applicant receives a response and is dealt with in a timely and courteous manner, which is solid employer branding.
Recruitment consultants can also provide interview feedback, manage the job offer and reference taking process and even ensure the successful candidate turns up at work.
Access to Job Boards and CV Databases
Companies simply don't have access to the same number of job boards, the memberships required to access them all instantly or the knowledge of the best job board for speciaist positions.
Direct contacts
Smart recruitment consultants are always recruiting and taking the best candidates on to their books. So even if these prospects are employed when your job becomes available, a well-connected recruitment consultant can identify the best candidate, especially for an executive position, and make direct contact 'under the radar' on your behalf.
Controlled Costs
Even with a fee of £4000 for the ideal candidate, who could be worth £1 million to your company in the years ahead, a recruitment consultant can still represent a significant saving when you consider the real costs of hiring your own staff.
Advertising alone can cost £300 per job board in extreme cases and you will need more than one for most positions, unless you're willing to leave the position open for longer, which incurs its own costs in losts productivity.
Then you have to manage the responses. On average, Coburg Banks receives 156 applicants per position. Even spending just two minutes on each application will swallow 5.2 hours of work time. You then have to correspond with all the candidates, arrange telephone interviews and bring candidates in for face-to-face meetings and assessments. This can take days and without a refined system you can miss out on the best recruits, the cost of which can be frightening.
Guarantees
A good recruitment consultant will go the extra mile to ensure you're happy with your new staff member. If the candidate doesn't work out, for whatever reason, most recruitment consultants consider it a matter of pride to help find a suitable solution and many offer written guarantees. If you manage the whole process yourself, ther'es nobody to catch you if you fall.
DIY Recruitment
Expertise
Nobody knows your company like you do, so what you lack in recruitment knowledge, you make up for with insight into your own firm and how the candidate will fit in on your side. If you really get to know your recruitment consultant then the relationship will pay off in the long term. In the short term, the consultant is only as good as your brief and you run the risk of having to sift inappropriate Cvs.
Resources
If you have office staff, you have the manpower to do your own recruiting. You might not have the software packages available to you, but you can do it the old-fashioned way and sift anything up to a few hundred CVs manually into Yes/No/Maybe piles.
If you recruit regularly, or get thousands of applicants, then you might want to consider outside help, investing in the advanced tools, or use LinkedIn's Recruiter Tools to streamline your application process. That's a halfway house, a bodge job, but it might be good enough for you.
Process Management
Yes you'll need to make sure that someone takes ownership of your recruitment process, which will take them off other tasks, but you're a professional business and so you can definitely handle a stream of applicants.
A distinct email address with an autoresponder can acknowledges every applicant as it comees in and keeps your applications separate, then you'll have the time to sort them properly. Will it be as smooth a process? Almost certainly not, but if you're prepared to put the hours in then you can do the job.
Of course the best recruitment consultants thoroughly interview their candidates and vet them in advance, but do all of them? Really?
Access to Job Board and Cvs
You'll miss out on a lot of Cvs that the recruitment consultant has access too, and you might not know every job board, but if you're prepared to spend the time on Google you can find a board that will bring you applications and fill the vacancy.
Direct Contacts
If you handle your own recruitment you can also take advantage of that old-fashioned method, word of mouth, and ask your own staff for recommendations. This has been proven to be a highly-effective method of recruiting high-quality staff since the dawn of commerce. You can also use every recruitment drive to build your own pipeline of talent and prepare for the next vacancy, so you have your own bank of direct contacts to call upon for interviews.
Costs
These are much harder to quantify when you're doing your own recruiting. Of course there's the basic cost of advertising, which may, on the face of it, look like a bargain when compared to the cost of the recruitment consultant. You might even save 50 or 60%.
But don't do yourself a disservice and igore the hidden costs of lost productivity as staff that should be doing something else turn their attention to your recruitment drive. Sorting Cvs, interviewing and assessing candidates and following through with reference checking can add serious man hours. We advise you to try it and keep a strict timesheet, you might be surprised how long it takes. If you entrust the whole process to junior staff to ensure the costs stay low, too, then you could miss out on the best candidate. But taking major time out of an executive's working day adds up fast.
Only you can qunatify the cost of hiring the wrong person for your company, but conservative estimates by independent bodies have placed the bill anywhere between £12,000 and 200% of the employee's annual salary in the worst cases.
Guarantees
Of course if you do your own recruitment then you're on your own. But you'll have the Cvs and a list of candidates, so you can do your own follow-up work once you've cleaned up the mess. And you'll come out of the experience wiser, smarter and less likely to go for that kind of candidate the next time around.
Conclusion
There are pros and cons to both methods and if you're a huge company that recruits constantly then the additional costs of software, training and process management can soon be amortised. In these instances, it can still be handy to have a good relationship with a recruitment consultant for tricky appointments, but they don't have to be your first port of call.
For smaller companies, though, a recruitment consultant can be a lifesaver as they take the time-consuming, costly and sometimes trecherous job of finding the perfect staff member off your hands.
Only you can know the financial details and only you know the true worth of a recruitment consultant to your business. We advise you to do the maths on your own, you might be surprised by the fresh outlook this gives you on the whole concept of recruiting in-house and how much of a bargain the recruitment consultant's bill suddenly seems.
