8 Reasons to consider a different recruitment solution

FourthLine Director Dan Waltham discusses the merits of looking beyond contingent as the only recruitment solution.

In our blog, “8 reasons your recruitment process isn’t working for you” , we said that your recruitment process should be flexible to fit the desired outcome. Likewise, tailoring your recruitment methodology to fit different hiring situations should be a consideration.

Most companies engage with recruiters in only one way,  contingent, but there are at least ten situations when you should consider a different approach .

1. New office launches

Before launching a new regional or international office you must be certain of the local talent landscape. Building insights of local reward structures, understanding the active and passive talent in your new location, and then engaging and nurturing  that talent long before you enter a new territory is an essential part of the planning process.

2. Senior level hiring to cover a resignation

If your business operates in a tight market, then a senior level resignation on your team should remain discreet whilst you identify a replacement. Advertising that role via your careers website and passing it out to multiple recruiters  will alert your competitors. Once the news becomes common knowledge, you will face retention risk as your company will become a target for headhunters. This is particularly important for Professional Services firms who often lose a Partner and then lose a team.

3. Mission critical recruitment

For contingent recruiters, a placeable job is measured by a host of factors. For example, the number of people they can connect with in 24 or 48 hours; the speed in which they get the job to shortlist and interview; the level of competition and the ease of finding additional candidates through LinkedIn.

If your mission critical job fails to meet any of these “fillability” requirements then it goes to the bottom of the pile. The more recruiters you use to find that person, the lower it goes in that pile. After a while it gets forgotten about or passed to the new starter to “give it a go”. The average fill rate for contingent recruiters is 25% - 35%. The process doesn’t work for them 65% - 75% of the time.

Why would you leave mission critical recruitment to chance? The only guaranteed way to make that mission critical hire with the very best candidate is to retain a recruiter.

4. Failed recruitment campaigns

According to folklore, Albert Einstein said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

We see this so often with contingent recruitment processes. The role remains open for months and months. It gets filled and then it appears again, a month or a year later. It elicits a chuckle from candidates when it gets mentioned and after a while, it gets the stigma as that job that nobody wants.

Employing a retained search process ensures that your recruiter takes time to uncover every potential candidate in the market. They aren’t going over old ground. They will also provide valuable data-driven insights which show you why your role isn’t as attractive as you thought.

5. Strategic hires and new roles

You don’t want to alert your competitors to a pivot in strategic direction until you have the talent on board to make that happen. You also need to stay ahead of your competitors when it comes to hiring the talent to solve tomorrow’s problems. By advertising those strategic vacancies and new roles or using multiple recruiters to hire those positions, you are exposing your new strategy to competition risk.

Using a more discreet solution with a more personal and tailored approach will ensure you protect yourself from undue risk and can launch the strategy with the talent to execute it brilliantly.

6. Challenging location

You are a specialist business requiring specialist skills and you are unique in your location. That differentiating factor means you will be very attractive to employees. However, the local talent market won’t always provide the skills you need in mission critical or specialist hires.

You should consider working with a recruitment firm to identify and nurture future candidates on your behalf to create an engaged talent pool. These candidates would be drawn from a deep dive into the entire candidate market across multiple geographies.

7. Multiple hire projects

It’s tempting to use multiple recruiters if you have multiple positions to fill. The logic goes that one recruiter won’t put equal focus to fill all three jobs / five jobs / ten jobs. Multi-hire campaigns tend to indicate either a strategic initiative, new team build or replacement of a failing team and alerting competitors to those factors might not be in your best interests. Instead, think about how you might control that risk and incentivise one recruiter to make the hires whilst at the same time leveraging your volume of hires to negotiate a better commercial agreement.

8. Ensuring diversity in your talent pool

Every single HR or Recruiting contact we speak with lists diversity as a challenge. All companies say that diversity (e.g. gender, ethnicity, race, education, background) is important but in the heat of the battle and the ongoing war for talent, shortlists and interviews aren’t carried out according to those ideals. You need to be deliberate with your approach if diversity is truly important to your company. As an absolute minimum, you should be mapping the market and pipelining  to ensure you nurture and develop a diverse talent pool and you may consider a recruitment process with promotes positive action.

Want to discuss the various flexible recruitment options we offer? Book a call with Dan.