Recruitment Agencies are not the only answer

Recruitment agencies are not the only answer when it comes to recruiting your staff - something your Financial Director may well have be telling you every time an agency invoice arrives on their desk. But for many companies this seems to be the only way they recruit new employees, but is shouldn't be. Recruitment agencies, recruitment consultancies and executive search firms all provide an absolutely essential service for companies everywhere, but they can work out to be an expensive option, if that is all you use. Have you even considered other options?

Have you examined and analysed all the ways you currently try and recruit staff? Do you realise that there are many ways you could find new staff? Some ideas are below:

• Your own company website
• Internal referrals
• External referrals
• Direct advertising
• Open days
• Developing relationships with schools/colleges/universities
• Online advertising
• Online job boards
• Networking
• Social networking sites
• Recruitment events
• Developing your employment brand and promoting it

What you maybe don't realise, is that you could do all of these yourself BEFORE you go to the recruitment agencies and incur a fee. Recruitment agencies use all the methods above to find people to fill your jobs, so why shouldn't you try them first?  If after trying these methods, you are still struggling to find that person with niche or rare skills, then it is time to go to the recruitment agency . Let them search their own database and network through their contacts to find the right person for you. In other words, make them earn their fee! At least then, you will have tried all other approaches first and spoken to any low hanging fruit.

But as you can see there are many methods you can start to use to reduce your recruitment costs, and all of them can be combined together to start to build a comprehensive direct resourcing strategy. The first thing to kick off with is to make sure that you are utilising your website effectively, by having job pages that are well written and appealing and career content about your company that will make people want to work for you. You can then start to use all the above methods to build a very effective way of recruiting more staff directly.

Comments

[johnysmith]

Great Posting!!!
Consider this: Recruitment firms only have access to a small percentage of the available jobs out there. In fact, many are not advertised or are ‘hidden’. It is estimated that up to 80% of jobs are hidden as only 10% of positions ever make their way into the hands of recruitment companies. And given the proliferation of agencies vying for a share of the lucrative commission, at best even the largest, most well-resourced recruitment firm has only 2% of the job market in a job seekers sector.