Reasons to use 3rd-Party Recruiting

When a family sells their home with no middle-man, there is a small chance that they could make a quick sale for a good price, but they are almost guaranteed to sell the house faster & for more money when they use a qualified professional realtor. In the same way, a business may stumble on a star candidate with in-demand skills for just the right price at just the right time, but these candidates are difficult to find on short notice. A 3rd-party recruiting firm can find better candidates in less time—& often are less expensive than hiring the wrong person.

The New York Times recently suggested avoiding recruiters because companies should always be building their own candidate pipelines. Unfortunately, this is unrealistic for most companies. In fact, building a successful candidate pipeline in a competitive industry takes more time than a full-time job (one informal poll calculated an average recruiter’s work week at 55+ hours).

1. Access to an actual candidate pipeline.

The “candidate pipeline” is a popular buzzword, but in practice, it is difficult to build one as an employer. For starters, most top job candidates will not talk to a potential employer unless there is an actual job opening—which defeats the purpose of building a pipeline. By contrast, a recruiter has a much easier time building a rolodex of candidates who may be interested if the right opportunity comes along.

No one ever gets hired from the mythical database where “we’ll keep your resume on file in case something else comes up.” By contrast, the heart of a third party recruiting firm is their candidate database, built over years of networking & collecting resumes. The trick here is to build a relationship with a recruiter who works in the right industry. A telecom-focused recruiter will not have a great pool of candidates in the finance vertical, & vice versa.

2. Save time. A lot of time.

The math is simple, here. Job openings with lots of active candidates receive hundreds of resume applications. It takes a huge amount of time to sift through them & screen the good ones. Some jobs rely on passive candidates. These candidates take a lot of searching & persuading to recruit, which also takes a lot of time. In the middle of a busy project, many firms just do not have the time. A third party firm can conduct both types of searches quickly & efficiently.

3. Lower chance of costly bad hires.

Recruiter fees are expensive, but so are hiring mistakes & never-ending hiring cycles. Recruiters also make the hiring process cheaper in several ways. For starters, they source within the hiring manager’s target salary range whenever possible, keeping costs down.

Secondly, many (if not most) recruiters work within contingency agreements, meaning they work for free. This makes them a cheap & highly motivated source of candidates, & frees up HR to focus on other tasks.

Most of all, recruiters source carefully, because they have skin in the game. If the candidate does not work out during the trial period, they lose their fee.

4. Attractive temporary staffing solutions.

A company may have an immediate need but cannot afford to hire someone under qualified. They may not have the ability to sponsor a visa. They may be working on a short-term project that requires in-demand skills. When deadlines & quality are at odds, a third party recruiter can offer a contractor solution. This makes it easy for the company to hire & let go with reduced liability, & it avoids the messiness of benefits packages. It may also solve an immediate need while the company searches for a permanent employee.

5. Quality candidate screening & onboarding assistance.

Recruiters do not just find candidates, they also phone-screen them, prep them for the interview, call references, conduct background checks, & many other screening methods. Recruiters want to make sure a candidate is interested & qualified before they send them in.

6. Strong hiring & interviewing skills.

Not every company has a well-established HR department to carefully screen candidates. It is often up to the hiring manager, who may not have the time to hone their interviewing skills. Recruiters source & interview candidates as a profession, & often they can spot problems & personality clashes well ahead of time. This is a benefit for the hiring manager, because candidates are more likely to open up to a recruiter about problems & concerns than to a hiring manager or HR department. This can help to reduce the number of offer rejections at the last minute.