How to lift your company out of doing 'roundabout' recruitment of contractors

So how can 6prog save me time and money?

I’ll come to that ... first let me set out how contract recruitment works today in your business. Generally each time a business recruits it does the following:

 Day one

•  Write (or dig out and duplicate) a job description.
• Send this to the in house manager tasked with hiring.

Day two

• They forward it to 6 agencies.
• 6 agencies call you for advice.
• 6 agencies advertise the work online to a massive audience. One accidentally leaves in your company name.

Day three

• 101 cold calls ensue asking if they can help you.
• Agencies send in 3-5 CVs each.

Day four

• 6 agencies call you for discussion.
• 26 determined agencies call you again.
• You review the 18 CVs and half are good. 3 are duplicated and 3 are awful.
• Ask the in house manager to set up some calls.

Day five

• 9x20 minute calls later you have a top 5 list to progress.
• arranging calendars

Days six-ten

•  hours of interviews (inc meeting a team member too)

Day eleven

•  offers out but 2 of the 5 are not interested/not available.

Day twelve

• 13 determined agencies call you again, (at least this is decreasing)
• someone accepts so you ask the contracts to be done and to start asap.
• Day thirteen
• Receive a call querying where the contract is and if there is room for negotiation on the fees.
• chase internal rec and external agency to close it all before it falls apart. Agree to slight increase in fees.

Day fourteen

• start internal prep for imminent arrival, relax that this phase is done.

TOTAL 35 hours. Almost a week. And spread over 3 so plenty of chance to lose a good contractor to a competitor. Some of the tasks weren’t a full hour and some might have been a bit longer. The distraction of doing this while holding on to the other ‘day job’ deliverables means a lot of distraction time is incurred. And that’s assuming that you get someone from the first round. Just one person. Imagine if you needed 2?!

Here’s how we do it at 6prog:

Day 1

•  Join 6prog
• Maintain a constant list, updated regularly, of talented contractors in 6prog. No GDPR concern for you, it’s a bit like Linkedin.
•  As work comes up clone or write a new work schedule. Not a job advert. Take the notes from your project plan.
• This schedule forms the contract.
• Issue it to a supplier (or a few) with whom you have previously worked or built up a relationship.
• If you really don’t know anyone you can search the community or hire a recruiter to help for a low introduction fee (payable only if you hire them).
• Book a call to discuss or bring them in for a chat.
• Edit the work order, click ‘sign’.
• They click ‘sign’.

About 6 hours and all done in a day.

• Join 6prog. Our services fees are lower than the agency margins too (but that’s for another blog).

What could you do with 29 hours added back into your schedule?