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Maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment, but I can’t help but read through the posts on the r/recruitinghell subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/)… Countless stories of terrible candidate experiences with recruiters and hiring managers (company naming and shaming is actively encouraged). And if there’s a central theme, it’s that recruiters are worthless and get paid for doing absolutely nothing. 

In all fairness, most of these stories are legitimately concerning and I feel for the people posting.  But the comments tend to show a general lack of understanding out there about what recruiting firms do and why so many companies utilize us. 

Let’s talk about why successful companies work with recruiters.

Talent drives businesses. Finding, hiring, and keeping great employees should be top of mind for leaders.  Successful companies prioritize recruiting and eventually build their own talent acquisition capabilities.  Even at that point, they continue to strategically leverage external recruiting firms.  Why?

SourceFactor works with companies of all sizes and at all stages of growth. All have different needs.  But every single one faces the same kinds of scenarios where our services can solve a critical business problem.  Let’s discuss a handful of situations where it makes sense for a company to engage with a recruiting firm:

Your organization has no internal talent acquisition teams or tools.

If you don’t have access to recruiting research tools and don’t have anyone to focus on the hiring process, you might need help.  Recruiting is time consuming and resource intensive.  The leaders of your organization are absolutely the best people to get candidates excited, make commitments, and ensure job fit.  But candidate research, outreach, screening, initial interviews, and all of the related steps in the hiring process might be best handled by others. 

Some of our start up founder clients were in “do it yourself” mode until they realized that their businesses were suffering.  They tried to save money by diverting their time and attention to all aspects of recruiting – at the cost of other areas of the business.  How much are you saving when your CEO or Co-Founder is spending most of their time recruiting?

Your organization has a small team trying to fill too many roles and things are falling through the cracks.

You’ve made the commitment to insourcing your recruiting.  But what happens when your hiring needs expand beyond your current capacity?  Growing your internal team is a great long-term strategy, but what if the surge in hiring is temporary?  What if you don’t have the budget to add staff?  How long will your current team underperform due to unrealistic expectations before they decide to leave?

If you have needs beyond your current capabilities, that’s a great problem to have. It means you are growing.  We can bridge the capacity gap for you while you continue to grow your organization.    

Your organization has teams and workflows designed to fill specific kinds of roles, and they struggle when faced with a unique need outside of their experience.

Let’s face it.  Not all recruiting projects are the same.  Your team might be outstanding at filling certain types of positions, but struggle when an occasional outlier need comes up.  If your processes, tools, and recruiters are focused on hiring very specific types of candidates for which you have a ton of openings, who do you pull off of those requirements to work on a one-off specialized position?

Some of our clients have strong internal recruiting capabilities focused on their core business needs – manufacturing, logistics, hospitality, consulting.  They have people, processes, and tools focused on effectively and efficiently hiring a lot of people for specific types of roles.  When a completely different need occasionally pops up, they have a decision to make… Do they reduce their ability to fill the core roles by reassigning a recruiter to this new need, or do they seek outside help?  

By the time they come to us, some of them have wasted a lot of time trying to figure it out internally. Those companies have reassigned a recruiter to the new role and quickly found that the recruiter doesn’t have the tools or experience to find and qualify the candidates for this anomalous position.  To make matters worse, while the recruiter is trying to come up to speed and make do with the resources available, the other jobs they were working on are starting to go unfilled and their internal recruiting team is starting to suffer.  This would be a good time to bring in some outside help.

Your organization is looking to expand into a new market, vertical, capability, or insource something that was previously handled by a vendor.  Or you are simply looking to broaden your talent pool.

This is a similar challenge to the last point, but with a different cause.  Instead of having an occasional need outside of their teams’ focus areas, these clients are strategically expanding into brand new areas – geographies, technologies, industries, functional capabilities – and need to quickly ramp up to find talent that is completely new to the current team.  The goal may be to eventually hire new internal recruiters with this experience, but that process also takes time and resources.  An interim solution might make sense. 

Your organization needs the hiring process to be confidential due to market or competitive considerations.

Confidential searches happen all the time.  When a leadership team needs to hire or replace a role in secret for competitive, business continuity, morale, or other reasons, they usually look for outside help. 

A third party provides distance and deniability that you simply can’t get from an internal team.  From a practical perspective, it’s easier to make discrete initial contact with candidates when your email address, phone number, and LinkedIn profile don’t advertise the name of the employer.  From a more nuanced perspective, the recruiting firm is unbiased, and not likely to have relationships with any impacted parties.  These are just a couple of reasons why a third party can be beneficial to low profile assignments.

A good recruiting partner can be your secret weapon in the war for talent.  Reach out today and let’s discuss how we can help you meet your talent goals.