7 Myths about Recruitment Agencies

Using Recruitment Agencies are a fantastic way for organisations to expand their team without spending time sourcing CVs and screening candidates. Recruitment professionals should be a consultative partner to your organisation, helping you find and secure new people for your business.

As with any profession, there are a number of myths to be debunked regarding recruitment, below are a few of the worst.

You can use a job board posting and find the same people as a recruiter.

Not all candidates are active on the market, meaning that they may not see your job advert when you post it on job boards, despite how many you use. In addition, the time it would take to work through all of the responses takes focus away from other elements of your role that need your attention, and is an inefficient use of your time.

Your HR Team will find the same people as an external Recruitment agency.

 This is not true. Many experienced recruiters have extensive networks of professionals within your sector or specialism that may not be currently on the market. By selecting a recruitment specialist who works within your industry you will be able to tap into that fruitful network.

In addition, a good Recruitment professional has the ability to look for candidates in places you may not. With their knowledge of the marketplace, they can find candidates within different territories who may be looking to relocate, or from organisations that you hadn’t considered sourcing from.

All Recruiters are the same.

There are many different types of recruiters. There are recruiters who work on retained projects and recruiters who work on a contingency basis. There are recruiters who work in one territory and recruiters who work across multiple territories and time zones. There are recruiters who are experienced in fulfilling junior roles, and recruiters with experience of fulfilling senior roles. Like any profession, there are people who are excellent at their craft and take pride in it, whilst others do not. For every bad recruitment professional, there are five more who are passionate and brilliant at what they do.

Recruitment Agencies charge high fees and give poor return on investment.

Recruitment fees cost substantially less than the cost of a bad hire. “Well-known recruiter Jörgen Sundberg puts the cost of onboarding an employee at $240,000. And, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, the price of a bad hire is at least 30 percent of the employee’s first-year earnings. For a small company, a five-figure investment in the wrong person is a threat to the business.”. Can your business afford not to use a specialist recruitment agency?

Your time is valuable, and using an external recruitment agency to assist you with your hiring requirements is a great way to ensure that time is effectively spent. Depending on whether you opt for the contingency model, or retained will affect your initial investment into the recruitment process. For contingency, you won’t pay a penny unless the recruitment professional is able to fill the vacancy for you. For the recruitment agency they will try their hardest to ensure they do this in an efficient but successful way. As a result, Recruitment of this type as a good ROI.

The perfect candidate does exist.

Unfortunately, this one is also a myth.

When looking at candidates to fulfill roles within your business, it’s important to remember that there is no such thing as the perfect candidate. Whilst you are likely to meet candidates who match some, or many of your requirements it’s unlikely that you will find one that will fulfil all of them, and certainly if you are restricted by budget constraints. It’s important for anyone involved in the hiring process to be aware of what is a ‘must have’ vs what is ‘advantageous but not required’ attribute. Ensuring this happens early on will help to streamline your hiring process – making it efficient and cost effective. Not only that, but it will make your relationship with your Recruitment Agency more beneficial.

Recruit only when you need new staff.

This one definitely divides opinion. Some HR Professionals believe that you should not recruit unless you are actively in a period of hiring, however others believe that always being on the lookout for new talent is more effective. The reason this works more effectively is that you are more likely to miss out on someone who would be a fantastic fit for your business if you limit yourself in terms of the periods you are able to hire. Candidates who are experienced and competent do not stay on the market for long periods of time, and therefore need to be secured as and when they do become available. A good recruitment professional will contact you during periods you are not hiring, if they have someone they feel you should meet with.

Using Multiple Recruitment Agencies help your search.

Whilst in theory it’s a great idea to engage multiple agencies as it adds additional manpower to the search for candidates, there are also negatives. Firstly, by engaging multiple agencies your Recruitment partners will not feel as though they have your loyalty and may therefore not be able to allocate as much resource to your role as if they were working exclusively. This is particularly true if you are working with them on a contingency basis, as there is a chance that another agency may fill the role and therefore the work put in my the Recruitment team will be redundant.

To ensure yourself and the Recruitment agency can work in a transparent and trusting partnership, only hiring one agency to assist you with a particular role is recommended. However, if you are unsure you are happy to commit to that, providing them with exclusivity for a period of a week to two weeks should allow them time to deliver suitable candidates to you, and if they are unable to it is then okay to release the role to additional agencies.

There are many more myths about Recruitment that require transparency that we haven’t yet covered, which ones should we clarify next? Let us know at [email protected]!