If you’re like many of our clients you may be unsure about outsourcing your recruitment.
You may even have heard some horror stories and think that recruitment agencies don’t have the best reputation.
It is completely okay to have these concerns! However, they are normally unfounded; so long as you choose a reliable and experienced recruiter.
In this blog, we are going to look at some of the most common fears that people have about outsourcing their recruitment and give you our response to them – so you don’t need to worry about them!
The purpose of this post is to alleviate your fears and demonstrate that outsourcing recruitment is hugely beneficial.
Concern 1 – I’m worried that it will take up too much of my time…
The big advantage of outsourcing is that it should free up a lot of your time! It’s no good if outsourcing frees you from the “doing”, but instead drowns you into a constant back and forth of correspondence, clarifications, corrections and supervision of the supplier you have outsourced work to…
As a benchmark, if you are seeing 10 CVs for a role, of which 3 are interview-worthy, but only 1 is barely suitable – you aren’t receiving a great service. By the time you have made your decision on the hire, you have probably clocked 10+ hours on this hiring, most of which could have been more productively spent on your core activities at work.
However, don’t let this lead you to the conclusion that outsourcing recruitment is bad! It isn’t… and there are ways around these concerns…
How to outsource your recruitment correctly
For one, you would do best to pair yourself with an intermediary who understands you and your requirements without you having to spell out everything in a written job description.
The problem with transactional recruitment is that the person serving your need has little insight into you. Therefore, you are always starting from zero. That problem goes away with a ‘trusted’ recruiter.
Furthermore, if you operate in a technical field such as IT, the recruiter who will save you the most time is someone who understands what is written on the job description. Far too many recruiters excel at the process of recruitment with little or no understanding of the content of the roles.
Work with them for too long, and you will alienate promising candidates from ever considering your organisation. This is because of the impression they have gained of your brand on account of early rejections without due appreciation of the skills they can bring to the table.
Head over to our blog article, Programme Staffing – Why Recruitment Should Be Outsourced, to understand why we think programmes should consider outsourcing recruitment.
We can help save you time
At Mindful, we know that you probably don’t have enough time to recruit. This isn’t unusual. That’s why we only need 10 minutes of your time before we start finding your ideal team members.
Yes, you did hear that right – we really do only need 10 minutes of your time! We like to call our recruitment method the ‘10 to 10’ technique as we will reduce your time spent on recruiting from 10 hours to only 10 minutes per role.
Are you serious about briefs taking only 10 minutes?
Yes! Unlike recruiters who know little about technology, we are digital transformation practitioners who are experts at recruiting.
With extensive experience working on transformation programmes, we can predict job descriptions based on the skills you need and the stage your programme is at. Our working practices ensure that briefing conversations are kept short and simple.
Concern 2 – I’m worried that I won’t like the people you provide…
You may think recruiting is a highly personalised activity. Therefore, it can’t be easy for another person (e.g. your recruiter) to truly know the type of candidates you’d like to see.
Is this something you believe too?
As a matter of fact, there is some truth to it. A good recruiter will get it 80% right, while a not so good one may be a lot further off, but no recruiter can be a body double for you.
As we indicate in the Hiring Matrix, who’s a good recruiter and who’s not for a particular role is really a function of how specific and nuanced you are in respect of what you want in a candidate.
The Hiring Matrix is a framework to help organisations identify how they should hire candidates.
How can you get the right people?
The key to getting the right people is to give feedback on what is wrong with the profiles you don’t like. A good recruiter will listen to you and add your preferences to the mix – not just for the role you are recruiting now, but also for all further roles with you in the future. A self-learning system of sorts!
The magic of having a retained recruiter only shows up after a few hires when you only have communicated your requirements to the recruiter in a rough and ready format – and voila, you have 1-2 perfect fit candidates, without you having to think or work the system yourself.
Here at Mindful we always aim to propose right first time hires. In fact, 90% of our clients choose a consultant from the first 3 we propose. This statistic only gets better the longer a client works with us…
Concern 3 – I’m worried this sounds expensive…
You may think most agencies offer poor value for money. This perception usually stems from a belief that recruiting isn’t rocket science. As a client, you may also feel that an agency should be grateful for your custom – as you could well have chosen someone else.
In some respects, your concern is founded. Recruitment can be done with very little thinking, with low-cost labour doing sifts and screens on keywords, and stopping at looking at anything after the tenth application received for a role.
However, bad recruitment shows up in familiar ways. For example, agencies asking questions you have already previously clarified, CVs reaching your inbox that should never have made it this far, candidates lost in the period from selection to onboarding, and so on.
What will a good recruiter do?
However, good recruiters will try to step into your shoes and represent you authentically to potential job applicants. They will sift and screen candidates to your standards and only present you candidates that you were bound to not ignore if you saw their profile.
Also, recruiters tend to be paid for success. Whilst this means a handsome perpetual reward for a successful interim hire, it can mean campaigns after campaigns not remunerated. Without a meaningful margin, there is a good chance that the industry will be plagued with just the kind of recruiters you would hope not to work with.
Here at Mindful, our operational costs are always sustainable, such that our customers and subcontractors benefit from our low margins. We are not the cheapest resourcing solution out there nor are we testing the limits of what we can get away with.
We prefer taking only exclusive work – but we promise to give you the benefit of wide job market coverage, of the kind you would get from multi-sourcing your roles.
If you want to learn about high volume recruitment and how to get it right, head over to our blog article here.
Concern 4 – I can’t deviate from my organisation’s policies and practices…
Having policies and controls to manage spend is standard practice in any well-run organisation. Working with a preferred agency does not mean that you have to break all boundaries, and go out on a limb. We understand many organisations will have preferred supplier lists (PSLs) and internal contingent labour controls, etc.
But, until you have spoken to the agency to explore ways out, how can you be sure there’s no way of engaging the candidate?
For example, did you know that we have provided a Central Government with a managed service focused on their Oracle Cloud programme with over 40 programme professionals? And that we have been commissioned on work packages outside-IR35, where the client’s initial view was that was absolutely not an option.
The benefits of outsourcing recruitment
If you just need some reminding then here are some of the benefits and returns that you can see from outsourcing recruitment.
- High-quality candidates
- Less time spent on staffing, and more on delivery
- Increased odds of digital transformation success
Having a trusted resourcing partner who can enable these benefits for you, is worth a sell internally. A good recruiter will be able to provide you with multiple options of engagement and will arm you with messages that you can take internally to your stakeholders so that everyone buys into the appointment, without compromising any rules or policies.
Ready to outsource your recruitment…
We hope we have addressed your concerns about outsourcing recruitment!
If you have read this and decided that outsourcing recruitment is right for you, then we should be able to help.
With our experience of working on (as against, merely, recruiting for) transformation programmes, we understand our clients’ problems intuitively.
You can find out more about our services here. We can’t wait to hear from you.
