Recruitment – Agency v Direct Hiring

A company can only be successful if the people within make it be. This is because a business cannot run itself and it takes determination and consistency to get things right and, in the end, will see great results. The people that you will hire for your company will become part of the brand and the image that this has on your clients/customers. This will impact their opinion on the company as customer services can be a deal breaker and leaving a good impact on your customer if what every business wants.

It is vital for yourself and your business to select the right people that will be best suited with their skills and experience to take your business to the next level and become successful.

You can either recruit your staff yourself or you can recruit them through an agency, although which would be the best method of recruitment.

For some companies it is often necessary to outsource the recruitment process to a specialist agency. To be sure you are making an informed decision, you should first consider both options carefully.

Advantages of agency recruitment:

Recruiting from agencies can be useful for some companies in approaching the appropriate candidates for their business. This can be used to head hunt someone for a specialised role or with specific skills that can be hard and time consuming to find if you were to do it alone.
Using agencies can prove to be advantageous as they not only have a large number of candidates available on their databases with different qualities and skills but they can also advertise your job application in a number of ways so it can reach to a larger sample of people, and therefore you, as a business, would have a higher chance of finding someone who will best suit the role.

Recruitment consultants are adept at creating a positive candidate experience for highly skilled applicants.

Direct hiring can be difficult if you have no experience or expertise in the recruitment process – you will be required to create and post suitable job adverts, work your way through potentially dozens or hundreds of good and bad CVs, carry out interviews and negotiate the entire process yourself. This can be tiring and time consuming if you have to carry it out yourself as well as running your business at the same time.

This is where recruitment agencies can come in handy as they will do everything for you therefore, being a valuable, cost-efficient way of finding new talent for your business.

Disadvantages of agency recruitment:

For small companies any expense can be a big one and therefore using a recruitment agency can also be very expensive and it is not the most efficient or affordable method. As recruitment agencies are driven by sales and commission, they can then to push some candidates that might not fit the business ethos and therefore it won’t be beneficial for wither party.

On top of having staff not suited for the job there will also be high fees to pay back once you employ someone as you would have to give them a percentage of their salary or you would have to pay a fee to use their service.

All too often, little attention is paid to whether the individual is the most ideal candidate; rather agencies focus on selling a ‘good candidate’ from their database instead of taking the time to source the ‘perfect candidate’… and with the fees they charge, the perfect candidate is what you should get.

This can then lead onto further problems as the employee may not have the right skills for the job role and this can mean that they will perform poorly on the job, which can then impact your company as it will affect your customers, or they might leave the company as they will feel too pressured to fulfil what is required from the job role. In cases like this, once the contract is signed, the client (that would be you) is legally obliged to pay the fee, regardless of whether the candidate works out or not. Therefore, make sure you are aware of the small print before you agree to anything.

Do it yourself:

Although this can be time consuming hiring the perfect employee for your company can really make a difference on how successful you will be. Spending some extra time finding someone suitable for the job that will stay with your company for a long time and they will perform good and improve every time will be more useful than using the first person sent by an agency that doesn’t know your company’s needs.

This will almost certainly be substantially cheaper, and you might be able to find someone that will really bring something into the business and will make I prosper for the future to come.  Recruitment agencies have their own motivations and they are unlikely to understand your company and its values as well as you do, so are less likely to see that perfect fit.

Universal Jobmatch from Government Gateway is a great service for finding suitable jobseekers. There are also many large job search websites with a vast pool of registered candidates just waiting for the perfect role. Sites such as Monster, Fish4Jobs, and Totaljobs,  (to name but a few) are all popular, effective sources used by many companies and recruitment agencies.

Understanding this is now up to you, and you will need to decide who will be managing the daily tasks and activities, or who will be settling business deals, as finding the right employee can be hard but not impossible.

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This post was written by Chris Beck