Let’s face it, recruitment is easy, right? Put a job out, relevant people apply, you handpick the best, conduct interviews, choose your favourite, done; but, if that’s true, why is the recruitment industry now considered one of the fastest-growing in the UK, valued at over £35.1bn and employing over 100,000 professionals across the UK? [1]

Any HR professional or Hiring Manager can write and publish job adverts. However, the process is time-consuming, complicated, extremely competitive, and potentially very expensive if not conducted in the best manner. Below we discuss why... although you can post your ads - often working with recruiters can be the more advantageous option.

Do you value your time?

Without question, recruitment is a black hole when it comes to time consumption.

Whether it’s collecting information about what your company needs in a new hire, writing compelling job adverts or sifting through applications received, all of these activities require significant input of time, pulling you away from other business responsibilities. That’s all before you’ve even picked up the phone to qualify potential candidates.

Say you’ve published a job and received 20 applications. For each of those applicants, you’ll want to review their CVs and cover letters and go through something of a research/macro-qualification process to determine fit. There will then be associated admin, next step phone calls to qualify candidates, emails, first stage interviews, etc. Imagine if that number is 50, 100 or 500.

If your sole role within a company is to hire new staff, this is less relevant, but for any Director or VP tasked with bringing on new staff, this level of time investment can simply be unrealistic.

On the other hand, for recruiters, these tasks are the norm. Not only that, but recruitment consultants know how to do these activities to a high standard quickly and efficiently. This leads nicely on-to;

Knowledge of the Market

Specifically, identifying talented candidates and knowing how to spot the good, bad and irrelevant.

Whilst there’s no question about the level of market knowledge most C-Level executives hold, how many can honestly say they know who the most talented people are in their industry, what they’re doing now, and importantly, what would make them switch companies.

Recruiters benefit from a very unique perspective, sitting centrally between their candidates and clients. Not all recruiters, but certainly the most successful ones, develop remarkably strong networks that provide tremendous insights into the markets they work within. This means they know the key ‘players’, who are active, who have specialist skills and inevitably, which people will best fit a new job role. This is all the more true when dealing with niche recruiters with select focus areas.

Through these networks, recruiters are able to source relevant candidates, qualifying them thoroughly before they ever reach your inbox; unlike job adverts, where any Tom, Dick or Harry is free to apply, something particularly true on broader services like online job boards. Quality over quantity.

Advertising Visibility

Alongside adverts on job boards, most hiring managers or HR staff will turn to their websites to promote new opportunities. The problem with this technique is visibility - or more so, the lack of.

It’s often said the most skilled talent is already employed [2], and in competitive markets like FinTech and Broadcast Technology which Caspian One is known for, this is absolutely true. With this being the case, unless you’re a company like Google or Apple, it’s unlikely high volumes of talented professionals will be flocking to your company website searching for jobs.

Recruitment businesses provide people hunting for jobs with one single source to engage with. If you think about the candidate's journey and expectations, would you prefer to go to one location with various career opportunities suited to your skillsets - or spend hours checking in on company websites to see if anything new has been posted?

That’s implying that the people you want are actually looking for new jobs;

Proactive vs Reactive

Taking on board the comments made above, if you don’t have sufficient time available, don’t know the best people in your market and are relying on job boards or website adverts for leads, you’re taking a reactive approach to recruitment.

Recruitment consultants take a proactive approach. Yes, they will usually post adverts on the company website and select locations proven to provide quality leads, but in-general recruiters will achieve higher placement success rates through proactive recruitment. This is a complex practice, requiring confident relationship-building skills and the ability to understand the needs of candidates and clients in equal amounts.

Mark the .Net developer is probably not going to leave his secure role based on a single advert, but he’s likely to be interested if the jobs were recommended to him by the recruiter who got him his current job and knows his career to date. Relationships based on experiences and earned trust are vital if you want to obtain skilled professionals in high demand (due to skill shortages).

Additionally, being able to screen relevant candidates and perform background checks quickly can vastly accelerate hiring timescales - especially for recruiters working with operational teams performing recruitment administrative processes on a daily basis.

What about the cost?

I’m not talking about the initial cost of hiring. Clearly, there will be a cost involved if you’re publishing your own adverts and hiring internally or using the services of a recruitment business. However, hiring the wrong person can make that initial hiring cost look small in comparison. For example, it’s estimated that a bad decision for a senior or director-level position in the UK costs businesses an average of £12,000 per individual [3].

This comes back around to the quality of applicants;

Who is going to bake a tastier cake, the highly trained patisserie chef or the part-time home cook? Both have the potential to succeed, and certainly, the home cook could create a masterpiece as they’re not new to baking - but weighed against the patisserie chef’s training, experience and knowledge of the kitchen, the odds for success are heavily drawn in one direction.

So, in conclusion to the question “can’t we just advertise jobs ourselves?”, absolutely yes, you can, and that advertising campaign could even be highly successful; however, it’s also at risk of inundating you with irrelevant candidates, wasting your time and inevitably not being seen by the people you actually want to attract.

Alternatively, if you work with an industry niche recruiter like Caspian One that knows your market inside and out, you will only ever interview candidates that ideally suit your company’s requirements and culture, with the knowledge each individual will already have undergone a detailed qualification and screening process to confirm fit.

To find out more about Caspian One and the services we provide for our clients, contact us at fintech@caspianone.co.uk, or call +44 (0) 203 691 9200 to speak with a consultant today.

References:

[1] http://www.sonovate.com/blog/uk-recruitment-industry-bigger-ever-moving-2017/
[2]https://blog.jobbatical.com/the-7-most-costly-hiring-mistakes-to-avoid-in-order-to-recruit-top-talent-15ea8976945a