How Can a Recruitment Agency Benefit Your Company?
As we enter into a new financial year, many UK organisations are forecasting budget requirements across the business to ensure they meet their strategic goals. A critical element of this exercise is workforce planning, as companies look ahead to where and when the right talent will need to be onboarded.
Why is a recruitment agency important for a business? There are many advantages an agency can bring to an organisation beyond simply reducing the time it takes to hire. Read below to see how your organisation could benefit from an agency partnership.
Where does a recruitment agency come in?
Collaborating with a recruitment agency should be part of your business strategy at the point of forecasting for the year ahead. Usually, this process involves taking a high-level view of your roadmap and the projects that contribute to it.
Part of the role of a recruitment agency is to work with you to cross-check existing resource against key milestones and project overlaps to help you anticipate the peaks and troughs in workload throughout the year. They will help you gain clarity around headcount requirements and where you might need to scale resource up or down. Seasonality and sickness are considerations they would typically be able to advise on, so that contingency plans and standby resource can be prepared ahead of time.
Can a recruitment agency save my business money?
Companies can often look at the upfront costs in engaging with a recruitment agency and be put off. The immediate savings an organisation gains from keeping their recruitment in-house, however, can often be a false economy, with silent costs mounting up in the shape of time taken to write job ads and conduct initial screening interviews, which falls on the hiring managers and HR teams.
Additional to this is the potential cost to projects that may be going unmanned for longer periods of time as a result of internal teams having limited capacity to recruit at speed.
To a recruitment agency, ‘cost-to-hire’ is a key measure of success. Therefore, an agency will work through this carefully with each client to ensure your needs are being met and you have a healthy return on investment.
As a partnership between an organisation and its recruitment agency develops over time, the business benefits from a widening pool of data from which more accurate forecasting can be drawn, leading to more closely controlled expenditure.
How can a recruitment agency help us stay ahead of the game?
As a recruitment agency, matching the right candidates to the perfect role is our day job!. We live and breathe everything to do with the markets we serve, from ‘horizon-scanning’, to today’s trends, and being privy to the strategies that others are using to gain competitive advantage. Recruitment agencies have access to specialist – and often expensive – tools that allow them to reach large pools of candidates with often hard-to-find skills. Equally, a well-established agency such as Australasian Recruitment Company benefits from a pool of candidates who are personally referred, and often not registered in other places for their job search.
With this extensive pool of data at their fingertips, a recruitment agency will be aware of the appropriate salary ranges, the high-demand skillsets that are impacting salary expectations, what you should be offering by way of compensation and first-hand qualitative feedback from candidates. Insights that inform businesses on how to position themselves to attract the best talent.
There is a sliding scale of how involved you can choose to be with your recruitment agency, and this can be adapted over time to suit your needs, from providing support and insights to managing the hiring process end-to-end.
Can a recruitment agency save my business time?
A key advantage of working with a recruitment agency is the reduction in time-to-hire. Most agencies have an ongoing workstream to actively build their pool of pre-qualified candidates who can be called on immediately if required.
On a purely practical level, a recruitment agency onside to manage first-line interviews can free up internal HR resource or hiring managers to do their day-to-day work.
Plugging critical skills gaps is another benefit of an agency partnership. Part of our service at ARC includes working with you to anticipate when specific skills may be needed – for example if you are diversifying or expanding your business – so we can begin reaching out to the relevant talent pools.
An agency will not only maintain close contact with their clients, but they foster long-term relationships with candidates too. Not everyone with the skills to match your vacancies will be actively looking to move (referred to as ‘passive talent’). Recruitment consultants have relationships with many such candidates and will have ways of incentivising them to consider new roles. The value-add to the hiring organisation is that of having someone out there playing the long game on your behalf.
How Australasian Recruitment Company can complement your workforce planning
The team at Australasian Recruitment Company are experts at matching the perfect candidate to the right company, and working with you to understand and best meet your staffing needs.
If you are planning your short- and long-term workforce strategy and would like to discuss areas where we could add value then get in touch with our team today, by calling us on (+44) 207 625 3300, or drop us an email at hello@australasian.co.uk.