WHAT VALUE DO RECRUITERS ADD TO COMPANIES?

The best recruiters have their finger on the pulse of their specialised markets. They should know the available talent, where they are and how to reach out to them, salary rates, career expectations, available skill-sets and current hiring complexities.

If other businesses are struggling to find the same people as you, they should be able to provide advice on alternative solutions. The best will act as partners and collaborators and should still be your eyes and ears in the market.

Outstanding recruiters have invested significant time in understanding how specific talent and employer markets work, giving them the credibility to offer objective advice that creates a level of trust.

Certain candidates are hard to find. They may be passive or they may be selective. If they aren’t responding to job advertisements, do not see themselves as part of your ‘talent pool’ or are too busy to search full time roles, then chances are that they may have relationships with trusted specialist recruiters in your sector. Even if they are not currently active, there’s a strong chance that a good recruiter will know who they are and how to reach them.

Agencies have many networks and each consultant, candidate, client or collaborator has the potential to leverage their networks to help connect you to people with a variety of skills and experiences, many of whom would be off the radar of an in-house team or hiring manager.

Finding a candidate online is not difficult, so why pay a fee for something you could easily do yourself? The answer is that finding the right candidate among an infinite number of people across all the professional and social platforms is not as simple as it seems.

People who apply for a position may not be good matches for the role and a lot of time will be invested in filtering, assessing, matching and communicating with them. Using a recruitment agency should mean that you see only candidates who have been pre-selected to match all the criteria that have been requested and who are worthy of consideration and interview.

A good recruiter appreciates the ‘art and science’ of finding the right person for the position

A recruiter should also be a specialist, be able to access talent pools not available to you directly, promote your employer brand positively, manage compliance and on-boarding, understand your business and team culture, know ‘what good looks like’, move quickly, have a strategy and be good value for money.

If your recruiter cannot tell you more than ‘I’ve found a good candidate’ they need to try harder.

A good recruiter appreciates the importance of ‘art and science’ in the process of finding the right person and will push back on the areas that are not evident on a CV in order to ensure the person they place makes a positive impact.

Anything in life that you resent paying for, probably was forced upon you or wasn’t the best choice.

Recruitment is no different. When HR works with a recruiter and feels good about the fee, it’s a sign that you have partnered with someone who understands you and your process.

A good recruiter creates knowledge. For example, they can assess ad responses and extrapolate information that can be used to make decisions by hiring managers or by the organisation for which they are seeking talent.

A paragraph from my book THE RECRUITER’S HANDBOOK - How to be a Big Biller

Anthony Kettle anthony@wcp.co.za or +27 21 5562313 or 0835929794