Looking to recruit for a position in your engineering business? You’re probably used to conducting the recruitment process in house with your HR department, but have you also considered outsourcing using a specialist recruitment agency? Recruitment agencies are a fantastic alternative to in house recruitment that offer a lot of potential benefits for you and your business. But what exactly do you and your boss need to know about recruitment agencies before you start your recruitment process?
Here are 10 of the key benefits of going through engineering recruitment agencies when hiring for your next role.
1. Saves Time & Effort
One of the main reasons that businesses decide to turn to an engineering headhunting service is that they've been trying to fill a position for a long time, with no success. This takes a toll on your HR department. Quality recruitment requires a huge investment of time and commitment from your hiring staff. This is where recruitment agencies can provide a useful solution. With regards to investment, commitment, and overall effort, recruitment agencies can do the majority of the hard work for you. This leaves you to simply choose from the selected candidates.
Not only this, but they can often source candidates in a timely manner as well. Many agencies either provide a set time frame in which to deliver a shortlist of candidates, or allow you to negotiate one with them yourself. This means that they're ideal for if you need to fill a positions quickly, for example if a current employee has announced that they're leaving and need to be replaced.
It also means that many recruiters offer a level of flexibility that allows you to negotiate and fine-tune the balance between time efficiency and thoroughness of the search, as of course the more time the agency has to conduct the search, the better the results will be. It’s worth noting that the type of recruitment agency you go through affects your level of investment.
For example, non-retained contingency recruiters can be hired in addition to any in-house recruitment you want to conduct. In comparison, retained headhunters are designed to do almost all the work for you, restricting you from using other recruiters for the same role.
2. They're Professional Experts
It’s understandable that many people are hesitant about outsourcing their recruitment on account of the seemingly large cost. But ultimately, when you pay for a recruitment or headhunting agency, you're paying for a level of talent searching and hiring expertise that is more advanced than most in-house HR recruitment departments. Recruitment agencies are often composed of teams of senior talent searching professionals with many years' experience providing bespoke recruitment solutions.
There are a variety of factors that make professional, experienced recruiters a valuable resource. These factors include their skillsets, dedication, network of connections, and professional insights. They're also experienced in negotiation and communication, meaning they can effectively understand the wants and needs of you and your business. They can work with these specifications to find exactly what you’re looking for.
Their communication skills also mean that they can effectively negotiate with potential candidates, and convey your role to them in an attractive manner.
3. Wider Range of Contacts
One of the biggest benefits of using a recruitment agency over in-house recruitment is the wide network of contacts that they have access to. Every business and their recruitment team will have an established network of contacts. However many fail to realise the difference between the size of one business’ network, and the size of a headhunter’s. This is because, quite simply, it’s part of their job to make connections and expand their pipeline. Hiring agencies often have not only a bigger pool of contacts, but also a more varied pool. Depending on the nature of the agency, these recruiters often have experience working with a wide variety of businesses, locations, and sectors.
Often your own business’s network consists of individuals and companies that have had contact with your own business and its employees. In comparison, recruitment agencies’ networks encompass this, as well as contacts from many businesses within the industry and related industries.
To say that a recruitment agencies’ networks are expansive is an understatement, and this network is one of a recruitment agency’s most valuable tools.
4. Saves Money For You
As stated previously, some people are deterred from hiring through recruitment agencies on account of the cost. Many businesses think that they can save money by conducting their own recruitment in house. However in reality depending on the capabilities and experience of your in-house team, this is can often not be the case. In fact, going through recruitment agencies can save you and your company a good deal of money in the long run. When you hire a recruitment agency, you're paying for skills and efficiency. When you conduct recruitment in-house, you’re still spending money on things such as travel for interviews, resources, and employee salaries for those conducting the recruitment. This last factor is significant, as in house recruitment takes up a lot more of your business and employees’ time. As they say; time is money.
Perhaps the most significant factor in this, however, is the financial and monetary impact of quality of hires. Put simply, quality of hires are generally much greater through recruitment agencies as opposed to in-house recruitment. When you recruit in-house, you’re running the risk of finding lower quality or less suitable candidates for your role. This means you're more likely to need to replace them if they aren’t right. Replacing new hires is one of the most costly risks of in-house recruitment, both in regards to time and money.
Due to the more detailed and expansive nature of recruitment agencies, they're more likely to be able to find the right hire for your role on the first try. This saves time and money for you by lowering the likelihood that you'll need to rehire.
5. They Know What To Ask, What To Look For & Where To Look
Recruitment agencies are experienced in finding the right candidates for the role at hand. Naturally, this means that they know exactly where to look to find the type of candidate you’re wanting to target. They also know what questions to ask you in order to get the best idea of what you want and what to search for. They know what questions to ask candidates which will allow them to quickly and effectively narrow down who the most ideal candidates are.
Once the search process has begun, recruiters are able to find the right candidates effectively and at a more reasonable pace than most in-house recruitment teams. This is due to their extensive resources, recruitment experience, and industry knowledge.
Recruitment agency workers have extensive experience in dealing with candidates and potential hires. They've often seen every type of candidate there is from a wide variety of roles and backgrounds. As a result, recruiters and headhunters know exactly what to look for in a candidate and how to find them. They're trained to be able to identify the key indicators of a good candidate for your role, taking into account industry and role experience, skills, presentation, location, and many other factors.
This also applies on the opposite end of the spectrum, recruiters don’t just know what to look for, but they also know how to filter out candidates. By doing this they allow the best, most suitable candidates to stand out the most. Much like anyone who has experience recruiting in HR, recruitment agencies have seen hundreds and thousands of CVs and candidates. As a result they're naturally talented at filtering the good from the bad, saving a lot of time in the process.
6. They Know How To Pitch Your Role
It can sometimes be easy to forget that a recruitment agency’s job isn’t just to find candidates for your role. The process also involves successfully approaching potential candidates and pitching your role to them as an attractive opportunity. This often involves presenting your opportunity in a way that grabs the attention of people who aren’t even actively looking for a new role.
This is often the hardest bit of recruitment, as many workers involved in hiring and recruitment will attest to. It can be extremely frustrating to search endlessly and find the perfect candidate, only to stumble at the first pitch and lose their interest. Simply knowing what your role offers just isn’t enough sometimes. Many high-level candidate’s need to be sold on the role, they need to be told directly why this is a good opportunity for them, and why it’s worth leaving their current role for.
Recruiters are experienced in understanding the fundamentals of your role, identifying the most attractive aspects and pitching them in a bespoke manner.
This means that they provide a higher success rate for candidate approaches than you would normally get from in-house recruitment approaches.
7. They Can Help You Fine-Tune Your Role
A great benefit of working alongside a truly quality firm is their ability to help you fine-tune the specifics of your role before beginning the search process.
What does this mean? It means that when the recruitment process first begins, you can outline the details of the role you're offering, and what features you're looking for in potential candidates. At this point, the recruiter can provide input into how feasible your target, the likelihood of finding your desired candidate in the right timeframe. They can suggest any changes that may be beneficial to both parties.
For example, some recruiting agencies may give advice on what type of candidate they think would be best to target for your role, if they think that you might be aiming for the wrong people. This can be useful if you're offering a role that the recruiter has experience filling, which is likely if you go through an industry specific recruitment companies such as engineering recruitment agencies.
Recruitment agencies can also advise on aspects that could drastically affect candidate response. For example the wage being offered, specifics of the job description, and job title. Recruiters know what the best kind of wage to offer for each position is in regards to your business’ needs, as well as how this can be leveraged through use of bonuses and incentives.
Furthermore, the way you title the job may seem minor to some, yet this can have a huge impact on how candidates view the opportunity. The job title can drastically affect the type of candidate the opportunity attracts. An example of this would be how results differ between titles such as manager, director, and executive, even if the job description and responsibilities are exactly the same.
Quality engineering recruitment agencies can offer assistance in helping you define your opportunity in order to attract the calibre of candidate you want.
8. Can Attract Those Who Aren’t Actively Looking
This is one of the greatest benefits of hiring through a recruitment or headhunting agency. Some of the most high-calibre professionals are already in gainful employment and not currently considering looking for new opportunities. The chances are, when conducting recruitment in-house, you miss out on a lot of these potential candidates. This is because your focus is placed on attracting those who are actively looking through job boards etc.
Recruiters have the skills and capacity to identify ideal candidates who aren’t actively looking for a new opportunity yet. Once they’ve found such talent, recruiters know what to say and how to pitch your role in order to open up the candidate to new possibilities. This can often even attract candidates who previously thought that they didn’t need or want a new role.
9. Databases Not Available To Most
It’s not just their skills and experience that gives recruitment agencies an advantage over in-house recruitment. Such agencies also have a range of resources and assets which aid the searching process. These resources include management programs such as advanced applicant tracking systems (ATS) and recruitment software, as well as access to job boards and exclusive recruitment networks.
Sometimes these resources are available to those outside of recruitment agencies, though high quality ones can be expensive. But there are also resources that can only be found in such agencies, as they're built on the experience and network of the recruitment sector. By utilising these resources, recruitment agencies can conduct detailed talent searches more quickly and over a much broader scope than most in-house recruiters.
10. Better Overall Quality of Candidate
Due to the experience and skillset of those involved in the recruitment industry, generally speaking candidates found through recruitment agencies are of a better quality than those found through tradition in-house recruitment. This is thanks to a combination of many of the factors discussed here, including searching and identification expertise, larger pool of candidates to choose from, resources available, and candidate communication skills.
One additional advantage of operating alongside a quality recruitment agency that many people don’t consider is brand recognition. This is one of the many reasons it's important to work with a reputable recruitment or headhunting agency. Such agencies provide a higher standard of service, and their name alone carries positive influence for candidates. For example, jobs posted on job boards through a reputable, recognisable recruitment brand are more likely to attract a higher number of candidates. Approaches to candidates who aren’t actively looking for work are also more likely to be successful when they're made by an established, reputable recruitment brand.
This helps attract a higher quality of candidates. Many high-calibre candidates will only be open to opportunities presented to them by a source they know and trust, either from recognition or positive word-of-mouth from others who have been previously recruited by that agency.
In addition, advertising the role through a reputable recruiter’s name rather than your own company can be useful if you’re not wanting to advertise that your company specifically is recruiting, or for filtering out applicants based on company name.
When looking for options to recruit for your opening, you obviously want to make sure that you choose the options which will produce the best results. Recruitment and headhunting agencies are often the best option for producing quality results. They have extensive skills and experience, in addition to a deep understanding of the fundamentals and inner workings of recruitment.
Ultimately, your initial investment of money when working with a recruitment agency can pay off down the line by saving you time and money, and providing you with quality candidates that are ideal for your opportunity.
If you’re an engineering firm based in the North West, you may have considered looking at what engineering recruitment agencies Manchester and surrounding areas have to offer. Here at Executive Headhunters we provide a bespoke, whole-of-market executive search service. We operate both nationally and internationally across all sectors including engineering, IT, construction, and professional services.
