How the Best Agencies Help Hiring Managers Save More Than Just the Day!

Our blog this week looks at how recruitment agencies can help business support hiring managers and entry level talent acquisition coordinators find quality candidates quickly.  

If you are reading this as a hiring manager, you already have a full-time job without the addition of being required to recruit business support staff – a process which on the face of it should be fairly straightforward, but which in reality can be incredibly time consuming and frustrating.  

Here are six examples of how the best recruitment agencies can save you time, save you money, and sometimes save the day.

Access to the Talent

Many of the best business support candidates prefer to have an agency conduct and manage their search for them. They find the best recruiters via personal referrals so are not widely registered, and they tend not to apply for multiple jobs on job boards. They are more selective as they know they have a lot to offer and they rely on market and sector experts who see the whole market to guide them towards well-matched employers and brands. You want access to these best-of-breed business support candidates, and working with a good recruitment agency enables this access.

Save Money

Companies tend to measure their recruitment agency spend according to the value of the invoices they receive. They tend to not look at the company’s lost productivity and revenue when line managers are distracted from their core job to that of seeking to hire talent directly – probably because there is no definitive answer and it is hard to measure. But rest assured, time spent away from core roles costs companies a great deal of money. Better to outsource to an expert and generate a surplus of revenues to more than cover the cost of the recruitment agency invoices.

Save Time 

Writing a high quality, targeted job description which will break through the plethora of other advertised roles; screening CV’s of often hundreds of applicants; arranging interviews; conducting interviews (1st and 2nd, sometimes 3rd); managing feedback; managing the offer and negotiation process. These are just some of the parts that make up what needs to be a seamless business support candidate journey from application through to acceptance. Very time consuming and very hard to make it look seamless. If you choose to work with a recruitment agency you are left with mainly conducting interviews and providing feedback. Using a good agency save days, even weeks of time, enabling hiring managers to maximise their role, and their teams’ roles for the company.

Find the Person Beyond the CV

How often have you looked at the CV of an applicant and said to yourself, “they look perfect”? And how often has that person been hired, stayed and gone on to be the perfect business support candidate? It’s rare. The challenge for hiring managers is that it is the words on the CV that look perfect. A recruitment agency goes way beyond the words to find the person beyond the CV, they seek to get to know their personality and character traits, their motivations, their career path (and the anticipated arc of that career path), their technical skills and an understanding of the type of culture that (a) they want and (b) would be a great fit for them. When you are working with a good recruiter, you only interview candidates who pass these tests. And occasionally, something magical happens when you hire someone you would never have interviewed based on their CV alone – and they end up being the perfect candidate!

Find Someone Who Will Stay, Not Just Start 

This is especially important in a pandemic or a recessionary environment: people are likely to accept a business support role because it is offered to them, not because they are wanting to work in that position and with the company for a long time. Be very wary of this. CVs certainly don’t tell you this, and interviews often don’t – we hear what we want to hear after all. A good recruitment agency will test, re-test and re-test again a candidate’s true commitment, often through multiple conversations with multiple recruiters about multiple roles.

Salary Benchmarking

It goes without saying that you want to be making an attractive offer to your preferred candidate, one that they will be delighted to receive and be eager to accept. Short of asking them directly, how will you know what to offer them? Too low, and you risk losing them. Too high, and you risk overpaying unnecessarily. This is not something to be guessed at. A sector and discipline-specific recruitment agency will know who is offering what, and to whom. They’ll know what the market is paying and what you should be offering for this particular applicant. They will give you the knowledge you need to instruct them to make an offer on your behalf which will meet or exceed the applicant’s expectations, giving you the best chance to secure your preferred business support candidate. 

If you are a hiring manager looking for your next business support team member in London, or a candidate looking to take your next career step, please contact us at ARC so we can help you with your search on 0207 625 3300 or hello@australasian.co.uk