Why Do Companies Use Recruitment Agencies?

March 22, 2023

Recruitment agencies are becoming an increasingly popular path for small and large companies alike. The ‘why’ behind this choice is twofold: The reasons a company has to consider hiring a recruitment agency and the reasons they choose one particular firm over another.

Why consider a recruitment agency?

There are many factors that urge companies towards outsourcing their recruitment, and they’re generally always along the same lines. Sometimes, it’s urgent and time-sensitive placement, sometimes it’s about outsourcing one headache of a process or even frustration over past candidates’ caliber.

In some cases, the role itself can be difficult to recruit for. Consider advanced tech projects that require a certain skill set and a significant measure of expertise. These talents are difficult to find for an HR department without proper training. Moreover, it would be a failed investment to train your staff in the intricacies of the tech world for a rarely recurring handful of position placements.

Some companies grow to such a size that handling recruitment internally becomes almost impossible. With entire departments and hundreds of employees, there’s only so much your HR professionals can do to keep up with advanced talent recruitment, especially if they have other, more important tasks to work on.

The point remains the same, companies that choose this path for their recruitment haven’t found what they’ve been looking for, and believe a staffing agency can be more efficient or that their own time can be better focused elsewhere.

Back in the day, the best way to choose the best recruitment agency for your needs would have been limited to your industry and the agency’s expertise recruiting for it.

Nowadays, this answer is no longer valid. it’s an entirely different world with an abundance of innovative tech implementation, and this is what should primarily drive your decision:

Efficiency & Time Management

Agencies have the advantage of incentives, manpower, and an ability to produce more results in shorter amounts of time than an in-house recruiter could. With commission on placement to drive their motivation, agency recruiters will actively work to provide the best candidate for the position. This may appear as a selfish motivational tool, but as far as efficiency is concerned, it’s more than encouraged.

Efficiency and time management are an especially inviting factor for large companies with hundreds of positions to fill. Most importantly, agencies are the most capable of locating and recruiting advanced, special, or locally unavailable talent.

This means that agency recruiters understand your target candidate beyond the role. Their expertise has allowed them to fully digest these talents’ employment habits, requirements, desired packages, and benefits.

These advantages alone have a remarkable effect on a company’s recruitment. Let’s not forget that agencies are capable of efficient time management practices that HR professionals are too busy to afford. With most of the company and office management tasks falling to them, recruitment is either not given the proper focus, or just isn’t done properly.

Vertical Focus

Agencies have the luxury of industry-specific expertise. It became a popular approach in recent years and all evidence supports its effectiveness compared to a more general recruitment model.

This vertical focus is meant to instill confidence, display expertise and reassure companies that their recruitment agency is capable of locating that rare talent they’re looking for. For example, JB Hired’s model was designed on this concept. With their recruitment focused on tech and digital talents, their team is more than equipped to locate candidates with advanced qualifications in their field, candidates that would otherwise be very difficult to find.

‘Quality First’ approach

We’ve all heard of the phrase “Quality over quantity”. This is one case where the phrase becomes a constant concern. Your recruiting agency of choice should be proactive in their process, to provide top-tier candidates who would be the perfect addition to your staff.

An agency that bombards you with resumes and subpar candidates isn’t trying to provide excellence, but simply fill a seat for the sake of filling it.

Experts & Senior roles

This is a complicated process that’s difficult to learn and achieve in-house. Experts with impressive experience and unique qualifications are extremely difficult to recruit. This is especially due to the fact that successful industry experts almost never actively seek out new positions. Most of the time, these individuals are well established in their career and company, much to employers’ disappointment.

However, as displayed by JB Hired’s model, this is a task for an agency that knows the field and understands the experts you’re hoping to reach. Through well-established networks and connections in the major tech hubs, JB Hired’s recruiters have the know-how to identify senior experts capable of solving complex business difficulties for large companies and fast-growing startups.

Global Recruitment

The talent gap, or talent absence, is a recurring issue for the recruitment industry. Consider a tech company developing a complex solution that requires locally unavailable qualifications. Lacking a specific skill on a national level can be due to education or lack of public interest, to name a few.

That same talent, however, might just be available somewhere else across the world. Though the distance might initially seem like an issue, talented experts can be motivated to either work remotely, or to relocate and fill a need specific to their abilities. This requires a very well connected agency, with international ties to multiple sectors and an awareness of the talent shortcomings around the world. It’s almost like possessing a heat map of where certain talents are located, and where they’re needed around the world.

An Exhaustive Approach

A significant portion of an agency’s process relies on tools and innovative ways of sourcing, vetting, and recruiting candidates. With job boards/portals becoming a lot less effective, it’s about manpower and expertise, industry knowledge and advanced sourcing techniques or innovative tech implementation.

More often than not, you’ll notice that agencies are always able to find the kind of qualified candidates that you always miss on your own. Sourcing expertise and industry practices refine their process over time, and this makes them very capable in terms of finding exceptional talent.

What makes a staffing agency a good one is a different issue, but people’s reasons to employ them are almost always the same; Efficiency, expertise, saving time and effort, and swift placement.