by Gary R. Crumb
While HR departments of small and midsized companies routinely handle tasks like administering employee benefits or implementing payroll changes, employee recruiting may come up only sporadically. A busy human resource manager may not have time to make the industry-wide contacts needed for successful recruiting. Additionally, the personality traits that make someone an administrative whiz might not make him or her the best person to "sell" your company to prospective employees. Outsourcing this function lets the HR department stick to its knitting while procuring better employees.
Recruiting Top Employees
If a company is outsourcing its recruiting function, identifying the company's personality can be critical to successfully attracting and retaining key personnel. That's why online recruiting companies, such as Accolo, include onsite visits as part of the recruiting solution package. Since the quality of the hiring process determines the quality of the employees it will attract, high quality, professional recruiting puts the most professional face on the company doing the hiring.
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Inside Outsourcing Human Resource
In-house recruiting keeps the control of the process safely under the company's own roof. And outsourcing this important function can be fraught with anxiety. However, outsourcing is far less risky than the nervous believe. Because hiring processes are measured and tracked, outsourced hiring can actually be less risky than internal HR. Accolo, for instance, measures overall per-hire costs, time to hire, and quality of the hire based on both employee and manager satisfaction.
Professional Recruiting Power Casts a Wide Net
A recruiting consultant will know where to find the type of person a company is seeking and can cast a wide net. If a bank needs a CFO, the recruiter already will know the banks with the best CFOs. Recruiters also know the differences in organizational personalities and will match the potential hires whose experience and culture best fits. Insider knowledge is an important benefit of outsourcing the recruiting function. Professionals like Accolo hire every day, day in day out, unlike a company that only hires when it needs to. Professional recruiters talk to people in a company's field every day. If fact, Accolo knows the players through the use of its Referral Source Engine, a network tapping technology that takes "who knows who" to a level of refinement not possible or practical with face to face recruiting.
Professional Recruiting Costs Less
According to Staffing.org, the average cost in the US of recruiting employees comes to almost 16% of their total annual compensation. Professional recruiting allows firms to keep their fixed costs lower as recruiting costs only increase with hiring needs. Professional recruiters like Accolo invest in recruiting technology and information on a scale that would be impracticable for all but the largest employers. This efficiency of scale allows them to cost less and offer more than an in-house department could.
Professional Recruiting Offers Guarantees
If your in-house staff recruits a bad employee, or fails to find enough qualified applicants, your company eats the cost of recruiting and you still have to find a candidate. Many professional recruiting firms guarantee their performance, so this isn't an issue when you outsource your recruiting function.
Using an outside firm for personnel recruiting makes sense for many small and midsized companies. It allows your human resource department to focus on what it does best, it can result in better candidates, and it may cost less as well.
Sources:
Accolo
Association of Executive Search Consultants
National Association of Executive Recruiters
Staffing.org
Gary Crum is nationally published author with over twenty five years of management experience in the banking industry. He has a BSBA in Human Resources Management from Florida State University and an MBA from Florida Atlantic University.
