So Why Use A Staffing/Recruiting Company?
You can probably Google and find out a lot of information on why you should use a staffing/recruiting company. I’m sure you’ll also find a lot of information on why not to use an agency. There are pros and cons of doing both.
Being a relatively new person to the recruiting/staffing scene I’m no pro on what’s the best option for you or your company. I can only speak from what I know through my limited experience and from reading and seeing different trends on the market.
Many fast growth companies today are good at what they set out to do - sell a product, services, consult, etc. HR tends to be something that is the weakest part of a growing company (especially smaller companies). So HR functions fall on the owner, or a part-time person, or a couple of people. This can be frustrating cause now those people have to sift through resumes, screens, interviews, etc of a ton of people (with many being way under qualified) before finding that gem to hire.
Larger companies with full-time HR departments almost have the opposite problem. The HR people are so busy with benefits, policies, employee issues, etc. that they don’t have time to look through resumes and do the basic screening and interviewing. When you add a technical position on top of that the HR person really has no clue on how to screen that candidate.
That’s where we offer our value. We do all that dirty work. We sift through the resumes (many horrible, some good). We do the detailed phone screening with those candidates, and if they are local to our office then we bring them in for an in-house interview or go meet them for coffee or something. We do our due diligence so that when we present a great candidate to our client it saves them time and effort. All they have to do is schedule a phone interview and go from there.
When it comes to the contract side of staffing it’s a nice “try before you buy” model. We take the burden of payroll, benefits, time cards, scheduling, etc for those consultants on billing. If the company doesn’t like what they see they just tell us to swap out the candidate. No need for them to fire the candidate. We do it all. After 6 months or so (if it’s a contract-to-hire) that candidate then goes perm with the company. It’s a great win-win for both us as an agency and the company hiring the person.
We know trends in the industry. We’re out there calling candidates all day, talking to companies, researching on the ‘net. Many times we can spot a trend before it becomes huge. We can start building our ‘inventory’ of qualified candidates before they are needed.
We have a pretty quick response time. Many times we can fill a job for a client within 2-3 days depending on the job and who we have available. That’s a great value-add to a company looking to ramp up quickly.
I could go on and on but in a nutshell, you want to use an agency to get the job done right, to find that hard-to-fill niche, to help you make a great hiring decision, to leverage our network and expertise in hiring, and to get back doing the things you are great at and the reason you are in business.
Are our services for everyone? Probably not. Many times a start-up company has great needs but doesn’t have the budget. Sometimes a company wants to get great people but are too cheap to realize that to find great people you have to be willing to pay for them. It’s a candidate market out there right now. Especially in .Net, Java, and Flash technologies. Those consultants are a premium. If you want them, we can get them, but be ready to pay for them.
Speaking of .Net and Java. If anyone out there is looking for a great gig here in the awesome Upstate. Let me know! I can get you something within days. It’s that hard to find great people.
