There are many benefits to working with a headhunter or a recruiting agency, both from a financial and operations perspective. Professional employment agencies serve a need in the business world by benefiting large and small businesses in a variety of ways, such as increasing cost efficiency, hiring better candidates, and allocating their in-house resources more effectively.
We are here to shed light on the positive returns you can expect from partnering with a top hiring agency. First, though, let’s address some basic questions about what a recruitment agency is and who might use one.
How Do Recruitment Agencies Work?
A company will hire a recruitment agency when they feel they need assistance sourcing and screening candidates for their vacant positions.
One of the major benefits of working with a staffing agency is that their expert recruiters will handle most tasks in the recruitment process on your behalf. This can include conducting research to learn about your open roles, identifying qualified candidates, checking their references, qualifying their skills and abilities, and ultimately presenting short-listed candidates to you — who you will then meet with to conduct further interviews. Your recruitment agency partner can then provide support and insights to help guide you through selecting a final candidate.
Once you have made a decision, extended an offer, and the candidate has accepted, they will start working for your company — on-site or remotely. A candidate who is placed in a contract-to-hire or temporary position will remain on the recruitment agency’s payroll, while a direct hire employee would go directly onto the company’s payroll.
What Services Do Staffing Agencies Provide?
There are three common ways for companies to hire for a new position or fill a vacant one when working with a staffing agency:
- Direct hire, also known as direct placement,
- Contract-to-hire, or
- Contract or temporary hire.
Each staffing service has its own advantages, and figuring out which is the best one for your business will depend on your unique needs at the time. One benefit of working with a staffing agency is that they have the experience and knowledge necessary to help you uncover which option will be the best for your particular situation. We will cover numerous other benefits below.
Why Companies Use Staffing Agencies
Deciding whether leveraging professional recruiting services is right for your business will be based on a variety of factors, such as your preferences, urgency, budget, hiring needs, and in-house capabilities (just to name a few).
After weighing the pros and cons of recruiting agencies, many companies identify that outsourcing staffing services is the most strategic and cost-effective move. This could be for a variety of reasons, such as not having the resources for in-house recruiting or simply feeling that the advantages of using a recruiting firm outweigh the benefits of doing it on their own.
Let’s explore a few more benefits of staffing agencies to help you decide if this is the right hiring path for your business and its needs.
Advantages of Working With a Recruiting & Staffing Agency
1. Reduce new hire turnover
New hire turnover is incredibly expensive. There are many hidden costs of a vacant position, especially the time and resources it takes to hire and train a new employee — and if they do not work out, you have to do it all over again with their replacement. When a staffing agency that has a successful track record steps in to help you place the best candidates in the right roles the first time around, it increases retention rates and decreases turnover costs.
2. Increase new employee hiring speed
Want to get things rolling faster with your new employee and save costs? An expert recruiting agency can help you get talent up and running more quickly through an expedited hiring process. At 4Corner Resources (4CR), we break down the hiring process into smaller and more manageable phases. We view recruiting as more than matching skills — it is also about aligning the organizational culture, personality and goals of qualified candidates through the hiring stages.
3. Reduce in-house employee costs
Having an in-house team can be significantly more costly than using the staffing services of a third-party company. A staffing agency’s fees are less than the salary, benefits, and other costs of hiring a full-time in-house recruiter.
4. A wider pool of qualified candidates
One of the greatest benefits of staffing agencies is their access to an enormous and ever-growing pool of candidates. A high-quality staffing agency attracts top-tier talent, with recruiters constantly working to expand their professional networks. At 4CR, we often source and screen hundreds of candidates’ resumes for a single job opening to find the most ideal fit, whereas a job posted by an in-house recruiting team may not get nearly the same volume of applications.
5. Greater access to top candidates
A high-quality recruiting agency and headhunter not only attracts a greater volume of talent, but a larger number of top-tier candidates. Since top-tier candidates are often passive (which means they’re not actively looking for a job), they’re less likely to respond to your outbound recruiting efforts like job ads and social media posts. Working with a recruiter is a great way to get a direct line of access to these candidates, whose services can provide significantly greater value than the cost of hiring them.
6. Faster recruiting, screening, and placement of candidates
As a professional recruiting agency, our network is vast, which allows us to respond quickly. Our goal is to have a fully screened and qualified candidate for any role within 48 hours. As a fundamental part of our process, 4CR recruiters:
- Maintain relationships with passive candidates;
- Keep detailed notes throughout the recruiting, screening, and hiring process; and
- Stay up to date with tens of thousands of active job seekers.
7. In-Depth Market Knowledge
Probably one of the greatest advantages of using a headhunter, professional recruiting, staffing and placement agency is that they have in-depth knowledge about your industry, local employment conditions, staffing and recruiting trends, and more. A good recruiter can also act as a great consultant; providing first hand, real-world insight that is not readily available to most in-house recruiters.
8. Maintain relationships with passive candidates & other job seekers
Don’t have time to keep up with passive candidates in your industry? That’s okay — we do. We make it part of our job as a placement agency to cultivate and maintain relationships with passive candidates as well as active job seekers. At 4CR, our approach to recruiting and staffing efforts align with our guiding 4R Principles:
- Relationships — We get to know our clients and candidates so that we can make the best matches possible.
- Resources — We use internal resources, systems, and tools that are designed to improve performance, flexibility, and effectiveness.
- Responsiveness — Your time is valuable, and so is that of your candidates. As such, we focus on fewer requisitions at a time to ensure you receive the most attention possible and that we are always there when you need our assistance.
- Results — Your objectives are our top priority. Using our proven methodologies and industry knowledge, we produce the consistent results you need and come to expect from an award-winning staffing agency.
9. Have access to a large recruiting team
Unlike businesses that have one person or maybe a few (if they’re lucky) to handle recruiting and staffing tasks, a recruiting agency has a large team of experienced professionals to address unexpected or volume-based needs on demand.
Two examples occur on a regular basis:
- A client needs to hire multiple people at once; however, their small HR staff is not equipped to handle such volume. We can have an entire team of recruiters working within hours.
- Our team is always on standby to address a spike in demand or an unexpected need where the end-user (client) would normally need to hire additional HR staff to handle it.
10. In-depth knowledge of proven hiring practices and techniques
A high-quality recruiting agency uses the experiences and knowledge they gain from working with each client to train their recruiters and enhance their recruiting and staffing efforts. They also take the time to get to know each client’s culture and environment, to place candidates whose specific talents will meet the competencies each employer needs.
11. Recruit from your competitors
As a professional staffing firm, we understand the sensitivities surrounding hiring candidates from your competitors. There is often a type of “gentlemen’s agreement” between businesses that entails not poaching employees from your competitors. While not an official rule, unlike a non-compete clause that a candidate may have with their existing employer, it is an expected industry practice by which many companies abide. Ultimately, this means that you’re potentially missing out on the perfect candidate for your vacant positions.
As a recruiting agency, we can recruit candidates from your competition without your business breaking this unspoken agreement. Our staffing service is bold and aggressive where you cannot be to maintain your professional relationships.
12. Guidance in forming Your hiring strategy
Should you be looking for a contract-to-hire or direct hire candidate? How many employees should you be adding to your team in the next year to meet your workforce growth goals? What kinds of skills and personality traits should you be looking for in a particular role? If you’re not confident in your answers to these questions, a staffing agency can be a valuable tool for forming your future hiring strategy.
13. Freed up time
When you have to spend countless hours on tasks such as posting job openings, sourcing candidates, and screening resumes, your time and energy are taken away from other day-to-day responsibilities. One advantage of employment agencies is that they handle most front-end recruiting processes; allowing in-house employees to focus on higher-return activities for your business.
Experience the Benefits of Working With a Staffing Agency That is Aligned With Your Needs
We have outlined just a few of the major benefits of working with a staffing agency — but you will not see success utilizing a third-party recruitment firm if you are not working with the one that is the right fit for your business. That is where 4CR can help! We are continually ranked among the top staffing agencies in Orlando, but we are also nationally renowned with clients and candidates across the United States.
We hope outlining some of the major advantages of employment agencies helped you identify what your hiring needs are, and if a staffing agency can help you accomplish them. To learn more about the benefits of working with a staffing agency and what a relationship with 4CR would look like for your business, contact our team of experts today!
