Why Choose a Recruitment Consultancy?

Your guide to the benefits of working with a recruitment consultancy

Choosing to work with a recruitment company can be a difficult choice. Often, by the time you are considering using one there has been money and time spent on looking for the talent you need and the idea of having to spend even more to get it can seem frustrating, particularly, when you haven’t managed to get the results you need but you have a company suggesting that they can do what you haven’t been able to do.

It’s for this reason that you should have a recruitment partner that has been selected well in advance of needing them. The main reason is so hiring isn’t done in distress but the other is so both parties (the recruiter and the client) know the capabilities and limitations of what the other can do. When this is achieved, recruitment is at its most successful.

It’s when organisation is in a hurry that mistakes are made, whether it be lowering the standard required without having made sure the talent pool has been exhausted, changing the person spec to the detriment of the role; or simply hiring someone that doesn’t have the relevant skills and experience to do the role you have hired them for.

Access to Talent

Recruitment companies have access to the best talent out there. 100% of our time is spent on the search for the most talented individuals in a talent pool. Once we have found them, we look to engage with them regularly in order stay connected; whether we are working with your organisation or not. This means that we can sometimes have access to very hard-to-find candidates with RELATIVE ease.

It should be stated that even for us there are skillsets and individuals that are difficult to locate and sometimes even more difficult to engage with. The very best talent is often locked up with your competition and enticing them out of there is never easy and can require a bit of team work on the part of our consultants and our clients.

Time

Lengthy or complicated recruitment processes are costly; both in terms of the time required to effectively manage them and the cost of roles sitting vacant within your business, particularly in healthcare as Locum cover must be applied to ensure no gaps in service and the continuity of care.

Having a slow cycle limits your organisation’s ability to grow or provide service. Your current workforce is likely to be more stressed and are far more likely to disengage when not working at full capacity; as we have seen in primary care when resources are stretched too thin it speeds up the rate of attrition due to burnout which of course speeds up the rate at which people disengage further.

time

Market knowledge

Working closely with a recruitment consultancy means you will be able to utilise their understanding of the market. recruitment consultants have their finger on the pulse and understand the current trends within the market, who is hiring, who is firing and why can be useful to understand when looking for people to join your organisation.

The very best consultants will communicate these trends with you before they even start the brief to ensure what they are undertaking is possible to achieve, which can be very useful when planning a role. As with other projects, when taking something on we like to make sure that the roles we work on and the parameters of the brief have been checked for being SMART (Specific, measurable, agreed, realistic and time bound). If we do not think a job is possible or is going to be too difficult to achieve as is we will tell you.

If our consultants and hiring managers are on the same page, then instead of the hire being left to chance it becomes a matter of time. For particularly difficult briefs, Menlo Park will even look to publish activity reports when unsuccessful to help our clients understand why the talent pool isn’t responding to their offering and how they might be able to change it to get the talent they need.

Savings

There are a host of ways that a consultancy can save you time, money and resources.

The short-term gains for recruitment are clear: you no longer have to advertise at cost. Time spent processing applications can now be spent on other tasks; freeing up your staff to continue doing what they were hired to do.

The longer-term benefits aren’t always so clear but are worth trying to capitalise on:

Qualified applicants that have been screened by a consultancy are less likely to require on the job training. This means less time is spent on ‘settling in’ and candidates can hit the ground running. You can save on training costs or shift your training focus to areas that have been overlooked/undervalued.
Locum cover is an expensive way of ensuring that there are no clinical gaps. With a recruitment partner that has been made aware on or around the time of a resignation it’s possible to have the position filled before even needing to advertise, particularly with many clinicians requiring a 3-month resignation period.
Applicants coming through a consultancy are more likely to stay meaning you are less likely to need to replace them.

Brand Perception

Poor recruitment processes have a negative effect on the way your company is perceived as prospective employer. Inefficient application processes, like an impersonal and unyielding portal, can leave high-quality applicants underwhelmed and likely to look elsewhere. Not to mention the very best talent spends most of their time actually doing their job. They don’t have the time or the inclination to spend what little time they have, filling them out.

Consumers now have higher expectations of brands than ever before; demanding fast, personalised communication and seamless experiences. These expectations do not disappear just because they are interacting with your brand as a jobseeker rather than a customer. If anything they become more important, as they are not simply trying to utilise your service they are trying to become part of it. They will be even more critical; and likely to think that if the hiring process is this long and impersonal, then perhaps it’s an indication of your teams capabilities or intent.

Recruitment therefore, must keep pace with the new standards for brand communication, or risk damaging your reputation. Working with a recruitment consultancy will help to alleviate some of these perceptions with an engaging, personalised and proactive approach to candidates and their applications, making them feel like they could be part of the organisation whether they get the job or not is really the key.

It’s amazing to hear how many companies still do not provide in depth feedback as to why someone wasn’t hired. And then even more amazing to see the detrimental effect this has on candidate engagement; and the possibility of converting unsuccessful applicants into candidates of the future.