Beginner’s guide to working with a recruitment agency

Finding good workers can be a difficult process, quite costly and time-consuming, which uses up a significant amount of resources and seldom offers any guarantee. For this reason, hiring through a recruitment company has become more popular amongst companies of all sizes.

Even with the growth of social media and online job boards, plenty of companies are continuing to resort to recruitment agencies. Here is why:

– The whole hiring process becomes smoother. It can take a very long time for you to pinpoint the specific skill mix you are looking for in a candidate, but a professional recruitment agency can help you identify the precise skills that meet the requirements for the vacancies you have.

– Recruitment agencies find candidates and not applicants. You are not wasting any time filtering, assessing and matching applicants. The recruitment agency will do that for you and you will only have to deal with pre-selected candidates, who have already been through the whole interview process and matched for your specific vacancies.

– Access to an extensive pool of candidates. International recruitment agencies have, for example, a candidate pool which would be very difficult, if not impossible to reach by your company without help. These potential employees will add diversity and value to your business.

– A distinctive recruiting process. Your company may already have its own recruiting process, but the recruitment agency, through its extensive experience has different ways of looking at the whole recruiting process. This brings plus value to the recruiting process from the beginning until after candidate placement.

– Constant support. The recruitment company will be there for you, to answer all your questions and offer you all the support you need from the first time you contact them, until after the candidate has been placed.

– Hiring through a recruitment agency is more cost effective. When taking into consideration the time and effort needed for hiring new personnel, working with a professional recruitment company is clearly less expensive.

Here are the steps you have to go through to get the most efficient results when using the services of a recruitment agency:

1. Choose a recruitment agency that best represents your interests. Look for agencies with extensive experience, which focus on your needs, ask you a lot of questions and give you advice on how to optimize the requirement-benefit relationship of your vacancies.
2. Make a brief. You must give a considerable amount of information about the role you need them to find a fit for. The agency should also know information about your company and the team where they need to place the candidate.
3. Be ready to adapt your offer to the market. Whether you like it or not, your job offer may not be attractive to potential candidates. A professional recruitment agency will give you advice on how to optimize your offer in order to get the attention of the job seekers.
4. Get ready for your new employees. When working with international staffing you have to be prepared to offer a helping hand to your new employees. This might include picking them up from the airport and identifying housing solutions for the first months after their arrival.
5. Keep in contact. If you have any issues after the candidate was placed, you should contact the agency as they will mediate any conflict that might arise after candidate placement.

You should also stay in touch with the agency if all is good. A professional recruitment agency will be happy to have feedback from you and if you are happy with the services they provided, maybe you will contact them again if you need to in the future.