For some vacancies you can quite easily use your own internal recruitment staff to find great new employees, but for others it can be a little trickier. When a difficult to fill position arises most companies find it helpful to use an external recruitment company to help source their dream candidates, and today I’m going to tell you a few of your options and why they are helpful!
Your Options
There are three main options when it comes to external recruitment: Recruitment Agencies, Job Board Advertising, and Flat Fee Recruitment. Depending on the role and your location, the best choice for you may vary, as these things can have an impact on how your advert performs.
Recruitment Agencies
These are basically a middleman between companies (you) and candidates. Recruitment agencies have specialist consultants who can find the perfect candidates, advertise your role on various job boards as well as contacting the suitable candidates on their database about it. These consultants tend to have a great understanding of what you need in a candidate, and will also go out of their way to ensure that they are a good cultural fit for your company.
For this service, recruitment agencies will charge a commission fee per candidate hired, with this fee tending to be around 15%.
Job Board Advertising
By advertising your role on one or more job boards you put your position in front of thousands of potentially perfect candidates, allowing them to decide whether to apply for the role or not. Adverts can be branded or unbranded, and there are pros and cons to both options (hold tight, I’ll go into this further later in this blog post).
Job boards will send you every application that comes in, and some boards will email your position out to suitable candidates. This means that you can go through every person who applies for your role. On the other hand, job boards can send your applications through to an application form on your website if this is required. After this, it’s your job to arrange interviews and hire new employees!
Flat Fee Recruitment
This is a fairly new concept in the recruitment world, and is basically a fusion of recruitment agencies and job board advertising. Flat fee recruiters will optimise your advert, post it on multiple job boards, and screen applications – sending you the best ones.
Your role will also be resourced on multiple job boards, in order to bring in more passive candidates. You can find more information about resourcing here but it is basically where your recruiter searches for relevant keywords relating to the necessary skills, experience and qualifications for your role. This process uses a Boolean search, and the best candidates can be emailed, or the recruiter will download their CV for you to see.
Pros & Cons
Obviously there are pros and cons to everything in life, and these things can affect your decision, so here’s a handy list of some of them!
Recruitment Agencies
The most obvious advantage of this external recruitment method is that recruitment consultants will often specialise in a specific field, meaning that they have expert knowledge that they can use to help fill your vacancy. So, if you have a role which is proving to be pretty hard to fill, an agency could be the best option.
A further benefit comes from the pool of candidates that an agency will already have, a lot of which will be on hand and ready to start a position like yours.
However, for more simple roles recruitment agencies are probably the most expensive, and another method would be just as effective for a much lower price. Don’t forget that agencies charge a commission fee (of around 15%) per candidate hired, so multiple candidate hires can get pretty costly, pretty fast.
Job Board Advertising
I promised you I’d tell you about the difference between branded and unbranded adverts, and I never break my promises –
Branded adverts reveal to candidates who your company is, while unbranded adverts don’t – simple! If you choose to go branded it tends to bring in more, and better, applications with a lower dropout rate, while posting an advert unbranded will keep your company anonymous to competitors who may be interested in which positions you are hiring for.
In general, job boards will encourage you to choose branded advertising. One of the main drawbacks of choosing to go branded is that it will cost you more, meaning that if you are looking to spend as little as possible on recruitment an unbranded advert may be the best choice for you.
Flat Fee Recruitment
An obvious benefit of this recruitment method is that it is a much cheaper way to fill your vacancy, especially when compared to using an agency. This is because your applications are screened and candidates are resourced, without the commission fee you would have to pay an agency.
A further advantage comes from your advert being branded, providing the great benefits of job board advertising, with the additional advantage of not having to sort through all of the irrelevant applications that come in!
However, flat fee recruitment isn’t always the best option for really specialist roles, as the recruiter is unlikely to be a specialist in any one industry.