When you’re hiring, it can difficult to decide whether you should launch your own listings for vacancies, consult your own professional network for suggestions and recommendations, or work with a recruiter. Recruiters can be expensive, but as well as lifting the burden of the initial search for candidates, they can access a wider pool of talent than you likely have access to. It’s down to you to judge whether you need their services for any particular case.
Entry Level Hires
When you’re hiring for basic level positions, you likely won’t need a recruitment firm to stretch their muscles to bring you the best candidates: by definition, entry level jobs don’t require extensive experience and candidates won’t have an existing profile that would bring them onto the radar of a recruiter.
The other side of the equation is that these vacancies will likely generate a lot more applications, and you may not have the resources (or for that matter the patience) to work through them and sort the wheat from the chaff. Entry level advertisements generate more ‘speculative’ applications than more senior roles, and identifying these and removing them from consideration is a time consuming task.
Depending on the needs of your business, it may be well worth your while to offload the administrative work of generating a shortlist of promising candidates to a recruiter or agency, particularly if you are filling a large number of posts at the same time.
Senior Roles
When you’re filling senior roles, specialist recruiters can likely be of more help to you – they have carefully tended networks of candidates looking for a challenge that they can match to your requirements and in turn can ‘pitch’ a job at your company so it sounds more tempting to a potential candidate. If you’re looking for executive search firms London has plenty to choose from, so you can select the right specialist for you.
That said, a specialist firm filling a high-level role will cost more, and you may have more access to a candidates for this specific role through your own network of contacts, or indeed by hiring internally. It’s definitely worth considering if you have a reasonable pool of qualified candidates already existing in your business, as ignoring people who are working right under your nose in favour of paying a large sum to a recruiter to bring in external candidates may well create resentment!
As with all business decisions there is no cut and dried answer to this question, only the answer that is right for your specific situation. Look at the vacancies you need to fill, the resources you have available to you, and you can make an informed decision about what you need to do.