I am writing this blog post to educate people that don’t understand about what external recruiters do and how they can be beneficial to your hiring process. Red Tiger Talent is about to turn 7 years old, so that is 7 years of experience each for Steve and I at being recruiters. That experience has opened our eyes to what recruiters do as before we started Red Tiger Talent, we only saw their role from a client’s perspective, which as they say “doesn’t show the half of it.”
I could write a whole article about outsourcing and why you should (and sometimes shouldn’t) do it, but obviously recruiters are part of the outsourcing industry, and the main reasons we get called upon are covered below.
We are niche
One of the main competitive advantages we have is that we operate in a niche market; we cover mainly Location Planning, Property Research, GIS, Consumer Insight and Economic Development roles. This means it brings a number of advantages:
- We know the market/s – this can be wage levels, activity/suitable candidates
- We know a lot of people in that market so we know who to approach
- We understand the skills (it also helps having been analysts ourselves)
So in a nutshell we work on any role that uses data and insights to help make business decisions. Internal recruiters will generally cover a wide range of roles and therefore having a niche external recruiter (or a few) can be very beneficial as usually these are the roles that, due to their niche, are the hardest to fill.
We invest a lot of time and effort
Only about 5% of our conversations usually end up with a CV put forward! What the client doesn’t have full visibility of is the effort we put into the process. It is rare that we only advertise a role – we are more head-hunters than recruiters. I often get asked “I wondered if you have anyone on your roster like this” or “Do you know someone with these skills that may be of interest”.
As external recruiters we do have a handle on who is looking but also we will reach out and draw up lists of people that we think would be good to target (who are not necessarily looking). As qualified coaches, Steve and I often have conversations with talent that is helping us (and mainly them) visualise what their next career step should look like. It is very rewarding when we place someone in a role in these circumstances and most often these end up being the best recruits. These are candidates that you most definitely would miss out on if you don’t use a specialist external recruiter.
We interview people
Being a recruiter is a lot about general and regular conversations but what I feel Steve and I are really good at is questioning around the candidates’ skills. This helps having been analysts ourselves as we can really start to understand a person’s skills, and also very importantly what they enjoy. Being technical people we understand the technical skill set and we can tell if someone isn’t really at the level they say they are at. I am actually a qualified interviewer (I tend to use SOARA for those in the know – separate topic for that one), so we do really add value to the process.
We help sell your company and role
When we start a new engagement we will request some time with yourselves (usually 30 minutes to an hour) where we will ask a wide range of questions about the company and team etc. This helps two-fold in that firstly, we can build our knowledge on what you’re looking for, and secondly we can explain (and sell) a lot about your role, team, and company to candidates.
We are consultants
This is the way recruitment is going (see my post on the current and future recruitment landscape for more on this), and we feel that we are already well placed in this area. We won’t just accept your role for what it is, we are happy to help give advice on all aspects like salary, job spec, interview process and more. As we speak to many companies we build a very good picture of the market and also given we are analysts, wherever possible we will back up our advice with stats.
In summary, an external recruiter can provide great value in helping you fill roles that may be more niche or out of your remit as a general in-house recruiter with lots of roles to manage. I am bound to be biased, but if you are thinking of outsourcing your recruitment in our areas and want to know more, do get in touch with Steve or I for a discussion on how we can help. I learnt early in my management career how important it is to get the right people and fast, so it’s worth exploring the help you can get to resource your team.
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