This spring was a tough time for companies and their HR-departments. Due to the pandemic taking over, many companies paused the hiring because little to none was in the position of making decisions. However, by the autumn HR-departments reactivated all their hiring plans, and the IT-market in Eastern Europe registered a huge hiring boom. The mass digitalization of business processes hasn’t made it easier either. HR specialists had enough on their plates already — and at some point, they didn’t have enough hands to handle the work volume. This is where outsourcing enters the scene.
How can outsourcing really ease a company’s existence? And is it worth the money? Here are 9 reasons why you should consider cooperating with a hiring agency to recruit IT-specialists.
1. Solving the Lost Profits Problem
Expenses at the moment or idling in the future? Lost profit is an important point to keep in mind when making managerial decisions. If your team urgently needs a specialist to function fully, you don’t really have half a year to find them because this would mean serious financial loss. And it’s not always possible to close the vacancy fast by yourself.
Usually, the hiring agencies’ services are quite pricey but paying for an employee to get right now is more favorable in perspective. Shifting some of the workloads to an external contractor will have a positive impact on the pace of hiring and on the general functioning of business processes within the company.
2. Managing the Degree of Engagement
The majority of big hiring agencies have flexible options for working with clients. Depending on your particular situation and financial opportunities, there are several possible scenarios:
- You pass a part of the vacancies to your contactor on a permanent basis;
- You only contact the agency at peak times when you need to find a large number of specialists;
- Recruiting agency steps in when you’re in need of unique specialists, unicorns of the market;
- You hire an implant — agency’s recruiter — to join your HR-department in-house for an agreed time. Implants keep their access to the agency’s base and instruments.
Full outsource, part outsource, or a singular call for help — the client chooses their own format according to which suits their business situation the most at the moment. Now, when a crisis has left its print on many spheres, recruiting agencies are especially flexible in their terms and pay close attention to individual cases.
3. Recruiting Base
IT-recruiting has its peculiarity — the majority of the potential candidates are people who don’t actively look for a job. Usually, they are already employed, and if they decide to post a CV, they receive new offers fast. The window of possibility is quite narrow.
When one comes to the agency with a particular task, there are high chances the agency can offer you someone within a week. Recruiters in the agencies keep constant contact with candidates and companies, so they profoundly know every segment of the market. Big agencies tend to have a vast base of candidates formed and updated regularly.
Don’t overlook networking. For example, our base has over 260 000 active CVs. Every month we contact more than 15 000 candidates, 1 500 of whom usually go to the clients. We update the info on the others: where do they work now, do they consider changing jobs, and is there a new stack in their skill basket. Having this many contacts with the market daily we can find a proper specialist within a couple of handshakes.
4. Professionalism and Experience
It sounds like a possible task for an HR-specialist to look for an average Java developer. However, even in this case, it’s possible to run out of candidates in your own resources. Imagine how easy it is to face a deadlock when looking for a unicorn? This is when alternative sourcing methods save the day.
There are lots of sourcing means including absolute classics like Linkedin, GitHub, or Stack Overflow. Experienced recruiters know how to use extensions for each of these platforms and get the most out of them.
Recruiters in agencies have enough expertise and resources to leave no stone unturned in the search for one person on the market. When things come to a rare specialist, recruiters use speakers’ lists from conferences and meetups, Twitter, IT-communities, their vast networking, professional forums. Yes, it requires quite some time to go through all the messages in the thread but that’s what recruiters do. Avarn, for example, has more than 70 alternative sourcing means, and our sourcing specialists are always adding up to the pile once something new is out.
5. Technical Expertise
HR-specialists inside the company are not always highly experienced in technology-wise to evaluate the hard skills and potential of a candidate. In this scenario, it’s the team that has to check whether the specialist fits the technical requirements of the position. Unfortunately, it happens when the candidate is already halfway through the whole process.
For example, many projects now require parallel programming but the HR-specialists didn’t specify which technologies are known to a candidate. And used technologies are exactly the thing that can be a dealbreaker in this case. If this information comes up on the second or third interview, the time for this candidate is not just spent but wasted.
Agency recruiters don’t simply look for candidates based on the given parameters. They also know the IT-sphere enough to coordinate the specifics of your project with the required skills of a candidate. In our case almost all the recruiters have experience in the IT-sphere. Specialists like these have the expertise to make sure the candidate introduced to the client will meet all the technical requirements hard skill-wise.
6. Speeding up the Hiring Process
When working with the hiring agency, the team itself joins only for the internal interview. At that point, they already have the CVs of the most relevant candidates and cover letters with candidates’ motivations and experience.
Say, to find a C++ developer, recruiters contacted 300 people. 100 of them reject the project on the spot. The 200 left are going through screening, so recruiters can evaluate their soft and hard skills. Out of these 200 candidates, only 5 to 15 will be introduced to the client.
In the case of internal hiring, a company spends its own resources for each of these 300 candidates, whether they are relevant or not. Working with a hiring agency the company only joins at the point when they need to choose the best out of the best. It really speeds up the whole process, because the agency is responsible for the initial searching and screening.
7. Recruiting without Interfering with the Main Activity
Outsourcing recruitment processes can be especially relevant in the crucial points when the workload of the HR-department grows: peak hiring seasons, rapid company growth, crises. HR-department has its own tasks, and their number isn’t getting smaller during these times.
The recruitment agency takes on the search and initial screening of people in a short time or in a large volume, removing some of the load from the internal HR-department. Your employees are engaged in the main tasks but the search for new people is not idling in the backlog either.
8. Payment upon Delivery
Often, businesses worry that the services of recruitment agencies cost quite a lot of money and even the best of them will not be able to guarantee 100% vacancy closure. Despite the relatively high cost of services, attracting outsourcing companies to find a specialist is beneficial to the client. First, you get to use all the agencies’ expertise and resources. Secondly, payment is usually made only after the vacancy is closed. In other words, it doesn’t matter how much time the agency spent searching for, say, a CTO for your project. If after all you decide to end the collaboration, or the search was not successful, you won’t lose anything financially.
In European countries, the average agency’s fee for a candidate is proportional to two specialists’ salaries. An idle position would have a greater financial impact since it would interfere with the planned flow of other business processes.
9. Guaranteed Result
The supplier’s task is to close the vacancy so that it won’t open again any time soon. This is the guarantee the customer pays for when using outsourced services.
But sometimes things go south: for example, the specialist appears to be less competent or doesn’t fit into the team. Then the agency shares the risks with the client and finds a replacement for the employee to close the same vacancy or a similar one for free. In our case, the potential replacement period is 3 months for an ordinary employee and 6 months for a C-level position.
