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In the quest to implement your business idea, having the right people in the right place is crucial. To ensure a stable and competent workforce for your company, you need to concentrate on two functions in your HR strategy, talent acquisition and talent retention.
These functions are vital across all stages of a company’s growth. In this article, we are going to take a quick and honest look at talent acquisition and why it could be beneficial to use an IT Recruitment Agency instead of recruiting on your own.
Most small to medium-sized companies (SMEs) start recruiting by themselves, delegating the tasks to the available HR personnel. In the case of small companies, there is often a single HR person, who would have to share their time between recruiting and regular HR work. In medium-size companies, where there can be several HR personnel, one of them could be fully dedicated to recruitment, while the others taking care of regular HR tasks. In both cases however, the people doing the recruitment will eventually find out the following: The process is much more time-consuming and costly than they originally expected.
We will consider the cases of a small and a medium-sized company. At the end of this article, we will also take a look at the case of a large company.
Let us first acknowledge a certain view: HR is not Recruitment (and vice versa). For our purpose, we simplify the difference and define it as follows.
HR deals with retaining people
Recruitment deals with hiring people
Both overlap to some degree, since HR personnel usually participate in parts of the recruitment. One particularly one part that the HR personnel participate in is branding of work culture in the company. The topic of branding in recruitment will, however, appear in one of our next articles. For now, let’s concentrate on pure recruitment and assume HR personnel will step in with support when needed.
The recruitment function could be decomposed into the following parts:
Sourcing
Identifying
Evaluating
Testing
To form a strategy for these parts effectively, you could consider these three key parameters:
Time
Knowledge
Tools
Let’s dive deeper into each of them.
Even if a company already has a HR person who is experienced in recruitment, the required time investment is substantial and often bigger than expected. For small companies having a single person dedicated to recruiting while handling regular HR duties, the task often becomes overwhelming. This leads to subpar results and frustration, both for the recruiting person and the hiring manager. At the same time, the main tasks of the HR person might suffer, further degrading the overall HR function.
By using a dedicated IT recruitment agency, you can free up the HR person to focus on the main function of HR, which is retaining people, instead of hunting for them. The HR person can still support the recruitment process with proper branding of work culture, as noted before.
Depending on the model of cooperation you choose with an IT recruitment agency, a dedicated recruiter can usually use between 10 and 40 hours a week on the process. This is simply time the company saves for tasks that are vital for retention of key personnel.
Sourcing, as part of the recruiting function, can be defined as the process to identify potential candidates and corresponding with them. This part consists of tasks such as creating search criteria, analysing profiles, conducting dialogues, and screenings. During screenings, the candidates are preliminarily evaluated and assessed for either rejection or further processing by a technical person. Chances are that the HR person delegated to recruitment in a company has limited IT proficiency. In this case, a lot of “misses” are produced in the form of poorly suited candidates which are sent further down the pipeline. The technical person of the company will simply waste time on meetings with candidates that should have been rejected in an earlier step.
In this scenario, it is better to engage an IT recruitment agency with proven technical expertise. The better IT knowledge the sourcing person has, the fewer bad candidates are sent to the technical person for evaluation. In addition, the candidate experience is much better when the candidate talks with a recruiter that actually has technical insight and understand the IT language.
Another aspect is the recruitment process itself: how to define the pool of candidates, how to find them, proper ways of approaching them, and how to conduct the interviews. This is knowledge you gain from years of frequent and intensive recruiting, not something that can be learned in a short time by trial-and-error approach or courses. Recruitment is a multi-disciplinary area, where psychology, interpersonal communication, market analysis, process automation, and IT knowledge makes up the key elements. Engaging an IT recruitment agency to orchestrate these elements would be the key to successful recruitment in a company.
There are several tools that aid a company in implementing the recruitment process. These vary in complexity from simple spreadsheets to advanced ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) with complex automation and AI support. Choosing a simple tool such as spreadsheets with some add-ons lets you kickstart the process but is feasible only for the simplest recruitment scenarios. On the other hand, using an advanced tool does not come without a severe cost in time, as these tools have a steep learning curve. Also, paying a significant price for an ATS doesn’t mean you can use it out of the box. If you want to take full advantage of a complex tool, you have to invest time in learning it.
Even if a company choose to invest time and money in an advanced tool for recruitment, it has to be remembered that this is not a one-time expense. Recruitment tools, as every other technology, do evolve, which means that you have to educate yourself continuously. If a company don’t do it and keep itself satisfied with the current state of of the tool, it will experience stagnation and the competition might become more efficient in attracting talent.
An IT recruitment agency, by its core mission, uses advanced tools, often further specialised with internal add-ons. It is unlikely that a small or medium-sized company can compete in this area. Even if such a company invest time and money to match the same level of tool-sophistication as a dedicated IT recruitment agency, it would not be strategically feasible in the long run. Following best practices in business, a company should concentrate resources on its core business and let a specialised external entity take care of the knowledge and tool part of the recruitment process.
Large IT companies typically have a dedicated HR department with a talent acquisition team, often consisting of several in-house recruiters. This team can handle multiple simultaneous, independent recruitment pipelines. These pipelines can be divided into a front-end stage (sourcing and identifying) and a back-end stage (evaluating and testing) stages.
To optimise recruitment, a large IT company might delegate the front-end stage to one or several external IT recruitment agencies. This allows the company to focus on the back-end stage, which is naturally closer to the company and bypass the time- and knowledge- intensive nature of the front-end stage.
Effective communication between the two stages is crucial, especially when multiple agencies are involved, to prevent conflicts during sourcing. In case when the company chooses to use more than one IT recruitment agency, it must ensure that their processes do not collide and undermine the whole front-end stage. Orchestrating this for a large company is not an easy task, but can result in a highly effective recruitment process. An experienced IT recruitment agency can help implement this framework properly and avoid pitfalls in communication between front-end and back-end stages.
In this article, we have outlined the framework of the recruitment process and the major challenges. We have also presented the gains associated with engaging a specialised IT recruitment agency. Lastly, we have mentioned that a company can benefit from the aid of an IT recruitment agency in the orchestration of a front-end and back-end recruitment framework.
In an upcoming article, we are going to talk about what a company should require from a dedicated IT recruitment agency in order to shape a highly effective recruitment process.
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