Written by Katie Doolan - Lead Recruitment Associate
Recruiting a new employee can be very expensive, and take up a lot of your time, without any guarantee that you’ll end up finding the right person for the role at the end of all your efforts.
If you’re an employer looking to hire someone new, you might not know where to start and wonder if you should try to find the elusive perfect candidate and deal with the whole recruitment process on your own, or if you should work with a specialist recruitment agency.
What is a Specialist Recruitment Agency?
A specialist recruitment agency specialises in recruiting staff for one specific industry or sector, e.g. Talentwise Solutions, who specialise in legal recruitment. This is different to general recruitment agencies who recruit for many different sectors.
So why work with one?
Extensive Candidate Network
A specialist recruitment agency will have access to the best candidates in the market through a mix of job boards, premium LinkedIn subscriptions and an existing network of candidates they have built up over the years. For example, using a specialist legal recruitment agency such as Talentwise will give you access to many high-quality legal professionals you wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach.
Specialist recruitment agencies have a comprehensive database of highly skilled candidates in your sector who are actively seeking a new role. Not only that, but we are also able to contact ‘passive candidates’ – i.e. professionals who aren’t openly seeking a new role but might be open to a job opportunity if it is a perfect fit for their skills.
Specialist recruitment agencies will advertise your job role on relevant job boards and promote your vacancy through their social media platforms which already have a large following of potential candidates.
You'll Save So Much Time!
If your job is already very busy, you might underestimate the time it takes to manage a recruitment process and think you’ll be fine to add recruitment to your long list of job responsibilities – how much effort can it really be?
You soon realise that it’s a huge responsibility and will quickly become overwhelming when you have 100+ job applicants to your free Indeed advert and after wasting an entire 2 days going through them all, none of them are suitable and you’re back to square one.
If a specialist recruitment agency is working on your role, they will handle all of the advertising, deal with all of the applications on various job boards, handle any queries or calls about the job, along with pro-actively reaching out to potential candidates.
Moreover, they will ensure that if a candidate’s CV looks good, they have spoken with them at length and made sure that they really are a good fit for the role and are genuinely interested before sending the CV over to you. This helps saves so much valuable time that you can spend getting on with your day job.
Not only that, but when you’re looking for candidates who are in high demand, you need to be getting in touch with them as soon as they put their CV on a job board or apply for a job as they will get snapped up quickly! Using a specialist recruitment agency means you won’t miss out on top talent because you were too busy to get back to them for a week or more.
We Are Industry Experts!
Understanding specific industries, such as the legal industry, is crucial in finding the right candidates. For example, legal recruitment agencies will know the legal industry inside out. This is because their job exclusively revolves around the legal job market.
It’s worth using a specialist recruitment agency that understands the specific functions and duties of legal job roles, the terminology, and the technology that separates an average candidate from the best one. These recruiters will use their expertise and knowledge to offer recommendations and advice.
In addition to this, speaking with candidates and clients on a daily basis means that specialist recruitment agencies can provide valuable industry insights, knowledge, and advice.
You Will Actually Save Money
Your first thought might be that hiring through a recruitment agency is a more expensive way to hire new staff. However, there are many hidden costs of not using a recruitment agency that you may not have thought of.
Recruiting for a new member of staff will take up a lot of your time. Without the help of an agency, this process will take you much longer as you simply won’t be able to spend the amount of time on it that an agency can, and you won’t have access to all of the places that recruiters do to find the candidates. This productivity loss throughout the hiring process can cost the business a lot of money.
Not only that, but if you have an immediate vacancy, just think about the money the business is losing by not having that integral person in role!
Agencies will do all of the work for you, and if they don’t end up finding the right person, there is absolutely no charge anyway so what do you have to lose?
Conclusion
It’s tempting to try and save money in the short term by just taking on the responsibility of recruitment yourself, but hiring the wrong person can be extremely costly. Poor performance and demotivation can spread fast throughout a team. It can also be detrimental if you have to ask other team members pick up the extra workload whilst you spend time recruiting, with many candidates citing the stress from these kind of scenarios as reasons for leaving their employers.
So, why not save yourself time, stress, and money by leaving all the hard work of recruiting to someone who knows and understands what they are doing and also understands your sector?
If you have any questions on any of the information in this article, or if you’d like to see how we Talentwise Solutions can support you with either a job vacancy, or with your own job search, please do get in touch. We’re always happy to chat!
02477 981223 / admin@talentwisesolutions.co.uk
