The Ice Bucket Challenge. Lessons for Recruitment Industry
For the past couple of weeks, it’s been tough to avoid following the viral success of the ALS ice bucket challenge. Literally thousands of people including quite a few celebrities and public figures have been dousing themselves with buckets of ice water for a great cause and challenging others to do the same.
No matter how you feel about ALS (also referred to as Motor Neurone Disease) or water conservation, you have to admit that the results of this fundraising are pretty outstanding:
- It’s raised record donations.
- It’s dramatically increased awareness of ALS.
- It’s gotten people involved in charity who would otherwise not donate to any cause.
- It’s providing invaluable lessons for other organisations to help with their fundraising.
What does this have to do with Recruitment?
The truth is that every day we have to deal with so much prejudice against recruitment consultants it almost feels like we need our own Ice Bucket Challenge. Yet there are multiple benefits from dealing with professional recruitment agency. Here are just a few:
1) Expertise
Recruitment agencies often have a level of expertise that far exceeds the HR knowledge in many small businesses that may not have a dedicated HR Manager or expert. The agencies are more in tune with employment trends, law changes, and recruitment best practices because this is their core business.
2) Better Candidate Pool
Many smaller employers cannot compete with the larger businesses when it comes to pay, benefits, and recruitment tactics. As a result, they are left out of consideration by top performing talent. Recruitment companies bridge the gap by leveraging their larger buying power and transferring those benefits to their clients.
3) Cost Savings
Using a recruitment agency is a cost effective option for certain processes and positions within your company. Your cost savings will be realized by:
Efficiency: Recruiting, screening and hiring a candidate takes a lot of time. Delegating these tasks to an expert will reduce the amount of time and expenses you spend on the recruitment process. Don’t forget that with Flexi’s RPO solution there is always an option of outsourcing just part of the recruitment process.
Advertising dollars: Recruiting for top talent takes an investment in advertising dollars to reach your talent pool. A Recruitment Agency would already have set aside advertising dollars for recruiting and are already reaching the talent you need. You can leverage their dollars and save yours.
Convert Fixed Costs to Variable Costs: For some positions in your company you could save money by converting your “Fixed Employee Cost” to “Variable Employee Cost” for example, if your business has very little room for overhead costs but you still need employees to respond to customer orders. You could use a recruitment agency only when you had orders to fill. Even though you pay a mark-up on the hourly rate you wouldn’t have to carry the fixed employee costs when you didn’t have the work.
4) Reduce Risk
When you engage the services of a recruitment firm, you get the talent but not the HR overhead. The employee reports to you but you have no liability – our service fee includes all statutory costs, payroll tax, workers compensation, superannuation, annual leave, public holidays and sick pay provisions. Hiring a casual employee through a recruitment agency is also a better protection than hiring an independent contractor especially if that independent contractor is a one-man show.
5) Flexibility
Larger companies are already taking advantage of using a contingent workforce to ramp up or down. As a small business owner you can use the agency’s employees as much or little as you need and have the flexibility to discontinue them once your work is complete. The maximum flexibility you get from what’s called Recruitment Process Outsourcing – RPO
Download Flexi Personnel RPO Brochure or contact us today to find out more about this service
