In this high-vacancy-low-candidate era, one of the most important aspects of a successful recruitment campaign is speed. If you’re meandering through your recruitment process, you will be putting the candidates off and giving them plenty of time to find and apply for something else.
Recruitment agencies are ideally placed
Recruitment agencies are ideally placed to help you up the pace of your recruitment and still find the best possible candidate. Their experience and focus makes them better placed than in-house HR departments to speed through the process without compromising on the quality of hire.
We believe that recruiters should be aiming to meet with a temping candidate within two days of reaching out, and the whole process should take no longer than two weeks from the moment the CV lands on the desk. Hiring permanent workers is harder to set limits on as it depends on the type and level of role, but agencies still have much in their arsenal to speed up the process.
- An agency’s greatest strength is the pool of talent in its pipeline who are ready to be invited to apply. And, as a specialist agency for your industry, we have qualified and appropriate candidates ready and raring to go. You won’t get a pile of unsuitable applications to sift through, adding time and energy to your process.
- We are experts in what you need to put in the job advert. We have all the knowledge on what makes a clear, concise and specific job advert that will ensure you attract people who have the right qualities and qualifications for the job and avoid those unsuitable applications.
- We can also advise you on current market requirements and on how to avoid being unrealistic! For example, not asking for ten years of experience or a PhD for an entry-level role. This, of course, will help you to avoid putting off perfectly qualified candidates and potentially not filling the role.
- Automate, automate, automate! Agencies invest in the best software to automate the process from job ad writing (for example, we have a library of adverts that the tech automatically populates) to tracking all the applicants in your campaign so that all our employees know what the next steps are for each of your applicants.
- Pre-screening questions in the application process are excellent for discounting unsuitable candidates automatically (these could be questions that assess basic skills or eligibility). Agencies have the experience to advise on the best questions to use and will have already completed and stored this in their database of candidates.
- Agencies should have references, already checked, for the candidates on record, which can save you several days in your process.
- Most agencies, including us, invest in online contract-signing software. This could save days of waiting for the postal service to deliver and return contracts.
- Agencies will often have pre-interviewed candidates and might even have one-way interviews on file, which will help you to filter out any inappropriate candidate before a full interview.
We still take care
All of this being said, we won’t rush through any of the process without care. A bad hire will cost more in terms of both time and money in the long run. In addition, if there are delays, and there inevitably will be on occasion, we keep the candidates informed and engaged in the process so that they don’t just feel forgotten.
At the end of the hire, we will look back on the campaign with you and think about what worked and where anything went wrong. This way, you can adjust your recruiting procedures for the best possible outcome in the future.