Why Use a Recruiter?

There are several good reasons to use a professional, experienced recruiter to fill your key personnel needs in your organization.  Not every position you need to fill can justify using a recruiter, but the key positions you need to fill are worth your time and effort to find and use a recruiter that you can count on to bring you not only skilled, experienced, and qualified candidates, but also those candidates who will be a good fit in your organization.  Here are some factors for you to consider when you have some key positions to fill:

1.  Finding good candidates is incredibly time-consuming.  Do you have the time that you can take away from running your business and doing you own job to spend hours looking at résumés?  What many hiring managers do not realize is that it takes just as much time to look at a bad résumé as it does to look at a good one.  On average, I will look at 30 - 40 résumés to find one candidate that I want to contact to discuss the job.  Of those I contact, usually one out of five is worth sending to the employer.  As you can see, that's a lot of résumés to review.  

Part of the problem is that if you post the job on job boards or in trade journals, even if you are very clear about the qualifications that a candidate must have to be considered for the job, you will get seven or eight unqualified applicants for every applicant that actually meets your minimum standards.  It takes a lot of time to separate the résumés worth consideration from those that are simply time-wasters.

2.  The longer you go with the position vacant, the more it costs you in inefficiencies and opportunity costs.  When you are doing not only your own job, but also the job of the person you need to hire, it's doubtful that you are doing either of them very well.  The inefficiencies and opportunity costs you incur are real costs, even if they do not have a line item on your financial statements.

Recruiters have every incentive to find great candidates for you as fast as possible, but they also realize that they are judged based on the quality of the people they bring to your attention.  The best recruiters work fast, but they do not sacrifice quality in the process.

3.  Finding great candidates is a skill that takes time to develop.  If you are not doing it full-time, every day, you are not going to be as efficient or as effective at it as someone who does nothing but that all day.  The best recruiters can generally see the red flags that others might overlook.  Because we are in a strong buyer's market today, many candidates are taking extreme liberties, exaggerating, and outright lying about their skills, experience, and education.  The best recruiter know when something does not smell right, and they can spot the pretenders early in the process.

Conclusion: Not every recruiter works in every area.  The best ones will tell you what they do very well and what they do not do at all.  When you have a key position to fill, a recruiter who has your best interests at heart will tell you if he/she is the person you should use, and if they are not, they can guide you to someone who can fill that need for you.