Pros and Cons of Hiring Recruitment Agencies for Employers
Hiring potential employees can be a time-consuming process that entails creating the Best Job Description to set your company apart from the competition, promoting open positions across multiple platforms, assembling a marketing team, and developing an employee value proposition, merely to bring in the best candidate.
To make this process a lot less tedious, companies prefer to handle the workload with organizations that can connect them with best-screened employees, known as Recruitment Agencies. Recruitment agencies specialize in finding candidates for open positions. Hiring recruitment agencies can streamline the process of finding skilled developers for your home services app development project. The process is typically more time-consuming and labour-intensive than hiring directly but can be worth it for larger or more complex jobs.
Hiring through an agency can be advantageous for companies that want to save time or money or cannot find the right candidate within their current workforce. It can also be a good choice for companies that want to avoid the complications and risks of hiring directly from the job posting.
Recruitment agencies are a great way to find new candidates for open positions. However, using an agency comes with its own set of risks and rewards. This article will look at the good and the bad of using recruitment agencies to find candidates to achieve business goals.
There are various advantages and disadvantages to work with a recruitment agency that needs to be considered when looking for one, as listed below:
Pros of Recruitment Agency
Lessen the workload of HR and managers
Getting a job description in place, promoting on social media, evaluating all the resumes, screening them against the required checklist, and engaging with them for entry-level interviews take a lot of time for HR and recruiting managers.
The recruitment agencies do all the pre-level hard work to get you in touch with the best candidate, including the onboarding paperwork.
Reduce Employee-related Risks
A recruitment agency covers payroll taxes, general liability insurance, worker’s compensation insurance, and unemployment benefits. It also gives the employer a safer side to not pay for the costs associated with the candidate, such as health care, paid sick leaves, or vacations. All this is taken care of by the recruitment agencies.
Gain Market Knowledge
Recruitment agencies are well-versed in the current market salary for various positions, the methods for reaching out to potential candidates or even passive candidates who want to work for companies, the history of a job, competing companies for growth, etc. Hiring recruitment agencies with strong branding can help build brand recognition for your company by leveraging their established reputation and network.
While working with an agency, the employer has the advantage of gaining market knowledge and learning how to promote the organization in a rigorous job-seekers environment effectively.
Field Expertise
Agencies know several ways to get to the best quality of candidates specific to a job role. Many might also have a database of such candidates who specialize and fit in the field. When a company undergoes a hiring freeze, it temporarily stops all new recruitments, impacting both internal HR teams and hiring recruitment agencies responsible for external talent acquisition. They have a vast network to identify the best-suited candidate, screen them for essential skills, and conduct the initial interview by asking the correct questions before referring them to the organization for further evaluation.
Cons of Recruitment Agency
High-cost of Agencies
While all the initial burden is processed and initiated by the recruitment
agencies, the price charged for handling such havoc and presenting the best candidate is often 6-12%% per employer’s annual salary. It varies from job roles, positions, and companies, which can get higher if the position and requirements are hard to fill.
Cultural Fit and Bonding Issues
Recruitment agencies try their best to fulfill all the cultural and professional demands of a company. Still, they can’t ensure if the candidate is best suited for the company’s work environment, ethics, and culture as well-enough as the hiring managers of the companies do. It can create a loss of interpersonal connection within the employees and cause the value to decline in the work environment.
Miscommunication or Misinformation to Candidates
The candidates contact the recruitment agents that provide the information of the company they are hiring for. Sometimes, this secondhand information creates confusion and misinformation to the candidates, which can get the company in legal trouble.
However, this can be minimized, but all such things are possible while
connecting through a third party.
One Candidate, Many Offers
Agencies are connected with many candidates and companies on their level. It means candidates have several options with the competing companies, which can wash out potential candidates to other companies.
Limited Employer Branding
The agency presenting your company can cause the candidate to base their opinion on the information told by the agent. The recruitment process is an opportunity to present and formulate the employer as the employer of choice that cannot happen if an agency is undertaking the first-level work.
How do you know whether to hire a recruitment agency or not?
Hiring a best recruitment agency is usually the best option for companies with more complex needs and more resources to spare. Agencies have staff on hand to handle the day-to-day tasks of hiring and managing employees, like screening résumés and interviewing candidates. They can also provide a more comprehensive talent network than a single recruiter can. On the other hand, if you have a small team and aren’t managing projects very complexly, a single recruiter might be a better fit.
- Discuss the plans and strategy with the HR team and see if the time accommodation, workload, and promotion to bring in candidates are in line or not.
- Look if it is a short-time investment or you need to expand the team to review screening applicants for the long term.
- Compare the advantages and disadvantages of hiring an agency for your company with the cost and other factors.
Author’s Bio:
Muskan is working as a content writer at Human Resource India, the best recruitment agency in India. Muskan is working with HRI for a great amount of time now. She loves to read and write and has a good knowledge of writing about recruitment processes, career advice.