What is recruitment, anyway?
The point of recruitment is actively going out to find the right person for a job. It involves development of a job advert, all the way to onboarding the new hire.
What is a recruitment agency?
Matching the best candidate to a role is time-intensive and costly. External recruitment agencies exist to do this job on behalf of the company that's hiring. They have access to a wider network of candidates, a long history of client relationships, and paid database tools to make the process more efficient.
What is internal recruitment?
If a company decides not to outsource recruitment to a recruitment agency, they will default to internal recruitment in order to fill vacancies. Internal recruitment tends to focus on innovative ways to hire without losing existing staff members.
Tactics include transferring valued staff members between teams, reorganisation, role changes, and managing internal promotions.
Why use a specialist tech recruitment agency?
External recruitment agencies come in many shapes and sizes. Some focus on industry, others on vertical, and a few only on specific skillsets.
Using a specialist tech recruitment agency has a few major benefits. They know the industry in detail and have strong (often exclusive) relationships with their clients. Tech recruitment agencies in particular understand the ever-shifting expectations of salary and can offer industry benchmarks - helping clients make better hiring decisions.
Candidate experience is likely to be better too - specialist tech recruitment agencies will only contact people if they have a strong case to do so, increasing likelihood of a good relationship. If there's not a job for the candidate when they get in touch, a specialist recruitment agency will ask if the individual wants to be contacted when a role suitable for them opens up.
Is using a specialist recruitment agency faster?
External recruitment in general is faster than internal, and helps companies reduce time to hire. Specialist recruiters use business intelligence, the latest intelligence, and incredibly strong talent pools to make finding difficult-to-source candidates even faster.
At Big Red, we approach tech recruitment either using a project-style approach, with defined start, middle, and end dates; or using a managed service approach. The latter tends to involve lots of mini-projects, and benefits from regular industry benchmarking, stats, check-ins, and opportunities to optimise the overall hiring process.
Do recruitment agencies screen candidates?
Specialist recruitment agencies reduce time to hire by pre-screening appropriate candidates, so the time to deliver great candidates to final interview is shorter.
An added benefit of this approach is developing a shortlist for each client is much quicker. Over time as a recruitment consultant learns the requirements of a client, their instincts about candidate suitability will become better honed, further optimising the screening process.
