Why You Should Consider Outsourcing Your Hiring

Why Should You Consider Outsourcing Your Hiring?  

Recruiting talent can be an extremely time-consuming and often frustrating process, but it is a process in which you cannot cut corners. Finding the best talent for your business requires attention to detail at every turn.  

If your internal team does not have the time or resources to devote to effective hiring, or if it feels like there isn’t enough talent in the market to fill your critical openings, it’s time to consider outsourcing your recruiting.  

What Does it Mean to Outsource Recruiting? 

Outsourced recruiting is the process of leveraging an external recruitment firm to handle the management of recruiting processes and activities for the organization. It can also be referred to as contracting or recruitment process outsourcing (RPO).  

Outsourced recruiting used to be a luxury for only large companies. However, recruitment process outsourcing is now used by companies of all sizes in nearly every industry. Recruitment outsourcing has become extremely flexible, allowing businesses to outsource either very specific portions of the recruiting process or virtually the entire process. 

Benefits to Outsourcing Your Hiring  

While it may be scary to trust someone else with your hiring processes, there are many reasons to consider outsourcing talent acquisition functions to an expert recruitment firm. Recruiting and hiring aren’t easy – if it were, no one would ever make a bad hire. Hiring is challenging, and the right recruitment process outsourcing partner can help overcome many of those challenges.  

Some of the benefits of outsourcing your hiring include: 

• Saving time 
• Saving money 
• Gaining access to talent 
• Reducing turnover 

Remember that outsourcing recruiting is not the same thing as outsourcing HR, an important distinction. HR includes benefits, compensation, employee relations, legal issues and recruiting. Outsourcing your hiring functions means your vendor only focuses on sourcing, recruiting and hiring exceptional candidates.  

Recruiters Will Save You Time  

Your internal search team and HR professionals have other core responsibilities on their plate, and unfortunately, recruiting activities can be put on the back burner in favor of what they believe to be more mission-critical tasks and projects.  

By outsourcing recruiting, you take much of this burden off of your internal team. Working with a recruiter means you cut out the initial and most time-consuming aspects of a candidate search. Recruiters handle sourcing, screening, assessment and determining whether candidates are well-aligned for your open roles. The right outsourced recruiting partner will only present you with candidates who meet and exceed your expectations, allowing you to focus on the decision-making process and keeping your internal teams focused on their core competencies.  

However, a strong outsourced recruiting partner won’t just save time in the actual recruitment process. Once you’ve hired your ideal candidate, you will spend less time and effort when it comes to training that new employee and ramping them up to full productivity. If you’ve chosen your recruitment partner wisely, you will have ended up with a candidate who has all of the skills and experience you require and is ready to dive in headfirst to make a positive impact.  

Furthermore, recruiters can help you boost retention, which means you’ll slow the time-sucking and revolving door of recruiting and hiring. The work they do in the initial stages to assess full alignment, along with their continuous follow-up with their recruits helps you enhance retention levels of the employees they place with you.  

Recruiters Will Save You Money 

Hiring new employees is a costly endeavor. The average cost to hire just one entry-level employee is estimated to be around $4,000. When you are searching for a candidate with experience, specialized skills, or if you are hiring a manager or senior-level leader, those costs are typically four to five times that role’s annual salary, meaning costs can reach tens of thousands of dollars. 

Further, you must factor in the costs associated with training and onboarding new employees, as well as the lost productivity that is inevitable during a new employee’s ramp-up phase.  

That’s why it’s so challenging to accurately track the cost of hiring. There are many variables in place, and there are layers of indirect costs. And if you make a single bad hire, you must start from scratch, and every dollar you spent doubles.  

Professional recruiters can help you control recruiting costs. Often, companies think that hiring a recruiter is more expensive, but the right partner can actually help you save on recruiting costs in a variety of ways: 

• Removing initial hiring costs: When you work with a recruiter, they do all of the sourcing and recruiting in the initial stages, allowing you to eliminate the costs associated with advertising jobs, promoting them, sourcing candidates, screening promising candidates and conducting testing and background checks.  
• Reduce the risk of a bad hire: Bad hires are costly, and they can have a big impact on employee morale. Working with a recruiting services company takes much of the risk out of hiring. It is in their best interest to find the right person for every role, and many companies offer contract-to-hire services where employers can test an employee on a trial basis before committing to a job offer.  
• Shorten time-to-hire: Each day a position remains vacant, it is leaking money. Empty roles mean no one is in that position to contribute to the bottom line, and other employees must abandon some of their core tasks to address the responsibilities of the vacant post. Managers and leaders must put aside productive projects to deal with hiring, as well. A recruiter can shorten time-to-hire, which helps reduce the costs associated with lost productivity.  

Recruiters Have Access to Talent You Didn’t Know Was Out There   

One of the biggest barriers to recruiting success is finding people who are not only experienced and qualified, but also people who are well-aligned with your organization’s culture. Add to that the challenge of finding someone who meets your criteria and is actively ready to make a change, and the process can feel impossible.  

This is where an outsourced recruiting partner can make a huge difference. The fact is your ideal candidates are actually hiding in plain sight.  If you’re seeking out active job seekers, you’re missing those “hidden” candidates.  

Passive candidates are the holy grail of recruiting. These are people who are experienced, skilled and accomplished but are not actively pursuing new opportunities. Why are passive candidates so attractive? Data indicates they are 120 percent more likely to want to make a real impact on their employer and are 33 percent more likely to request challenging projects.  

Passive candidates are also 17 percent less likely to require skill development.  Passive candidates are the best candidates, but only 61 percent of companies have a process in place for actively recruiting passive talent, leaving the remaining 40 percent suffering from a shallow pool of active talent.  

But landing passive candidates isn’t easy. It takes a long time to build relationships and trust. It also requires a good sense of timing and even a bit of salesmanship. Many internal search teams lack the time and resources to devote to a passive recruiting strategy.  However, outsourced recruitment professionals have the time to make those connections and relationships with passive candidates and provide you with instant access to talent you didn’t even know was out there.  

Search Options When Working with a Recruiter  

Recruitment process outsourcing companies have many different types of fee structures, which can make it difficult to evaluate which is best for your company. Two of the most popular and cost-effective search options when working with a recruiter are:  

Contingent Search 

In a contingent search, the recruiter only gets paid if you hire someone they send to you. These searches are results-driven and allow you to leverage several outsourced recruiting firms at once, upping the pressure on each recruiting firm to deliver exceptional talent. Contingent searches impact the recruiters’ performance in several ways: 

• Recruiters must spend time on activities that drive results: In a contingent search, the clock is ticking. If a recruiter doesn’t come up with a strong candidate quickly, they will lose out on their fee, and all of their work is for nothing.  
• They must be versed in the market: The more a recruiter knows about your market, your industry and your niche, the better. This expertise means a stronger candidate pool and the ability to drive results quickly.  

• Contingent recruiters must build strong relationships with you: Contingent recruiters know that when you trust them, you’ll leverage their services again and again.  

Contingent searches are ideal for certain types of situations. Typically, you’d want to look into a contingency search when: 

• You are looking for entry or mid-level talent. 
• You want to test out a potential long-term partnership with a strategic recruiting firm. 
• You are hiring for multiple positions at the same time. 

• Your own hiring team struggles to fill a particular position. 

There are also some drawbacks to contingent searches. In this type of arrangement, the recruiter does not have an exclusivity agreement with you, which means they can also be actively recruiting for your competitors.  And in some cases, because speed is a factor, a few recruiters (though certainly not all) may focus only on candidates who meet expectations rather than exceed them. 

Hourly Search 

Typically, outsourced recruiting firms will either have contingency agreements or retained agreements. In a retained search, you pay monthly for a recruiter’s services whether they come through or not. A more cost-effective alternative to retained search is hourly search.  

In an hourly search, you pay only for the time that your recruiter spends working on your search. It’s like paying an attorney in your personal life– only much more affordable and less stressful. In an hourly recruiting pay model, the outsourced recruiting firm charges a specific hourly rate for specific processes like screening or background checks.  

Hourly recruiting pay models allow you to leverage a more on-demand relationship with your outsourced recruitment partner. If you don’t need to hire anyone for a few months, you don’t have to pay. If you have cyclical demands or find that you need to hire a couple of times a year unexpectedly, you can just “activate” your recruiter as needed. 

As with contingent searches, there can be drawbacks to hourly searches. If you choose the wrong recruiting firm, they could drive up billing (much like that attorney referenced above) on busywork to pad their own income. That’s why it’s so important to choose the right outsourced recruiting partner because a good firm will not pad billing, will charge reasonable rates and will ensure you’re getting the most for your money.  

How to Find the Right Recruiters 

A quick google search of recruiting firms near you or in your niche will kick back hundreds of results. So how can you find the right recruiters for your needs? Asking trusted business associates in your market and industry can be a great start. Or you can research on your own. However, you choose to get started, take your time and conduct plenty of due diligence to make sure that a potential recruiting firm will meet your needs and will help you achieve your specific outsourced recruiting goals.  

The firm should have experience in your field and should have a solid track record of making placements. Don’t be shy about asking for results or even references from a recruiting partner because the right recruitment process outsourcing firm can help you save time, money and improve hires, but the wrong choice could be more costly than doing nothing at all.  

Are you looking for an expert recruitment process outsourcing partner? Work with an expert firm like Tristarr. We can help you overcome your most vexing hiring challenges while helping you control costs and improving the quality of your new hires. Contact TriStarr today to find the perfect talent fit for your open positions.