A partner in IT recruitment
Technology recruitment, and especially the search for top professionals, can be a difficult task for in-house recruiters who do not deal with the IT industry on a daily basis. A successful outcome of the recruitment process depends on the specialist knowledge that enables a professional review of a candidate’s skills, which is a strong argument for the outsourcing of the recruitment process.
The hunt for specialists
Hiring a new employee involves several phases. First, you need to decide what kind of people and IT skills you are looking for. You should then publish a job ad, review incoming applications, and handpick the most promising candidates who will be interviewed and evaluated. The whole process concludes with the selection of the perfect candidates and job offer proposals. So much for the theory. Things get more complicated in real life, especially in the IT industry, which faces chronic shortages of specialists. The demand for technology talent is so great that job ads frequently fail to generate any response at all. Nowadays, you don’t recruit IT specialists; you need to fight tooth and nail with competitors to find them. For many companies, especially non-techs, finding the right IT people may be an overwhelming task. At the same time, no business or industry can operate smoothly without IT experts.
How to recruit an IT recruiter?
In Poland, the average recruitment process takes 59 days, according to ICAN Research. IT specialists are recruited even longer. If you want to hire the right person quickly, you should consider outsourcing the recruitment process. Professional recruiters’ engagement streamlines the process and highly improves the probability of finding the right persons for the job.
According to a Salesforce report on the IT industry, a considerable 30% of employers have difficulties in finding a suitable candidate to fill an IT role. Interestingly, the problem is by no means specific to small companies: more than 62% of the affected employers are enterprises with a workforce of more than 250. Why is it so?
One of the biggest challenges in the recruitment of computer scientists, programmers, and other IT experts concerns is access to the candidate pool. Increasingly often, the few suitable candidates are actively sought after by many prospective employers and recruiters, which is a pretty good reason for hiring an experienced professional to handle recruitment. Yet, this rationale is rarely applied. In most cases, businesses carry out IT recruitment through their HR functions. Companies operating their own IT departments capable of supporting the recruitment process, still have a chance to find the right candidate. Still, the rest may find it hard to evaluate the skills and knowledge of the prospective employee. Recruiters dealing with candidates from the technology sector need advanced specialist knowledge to fill openings with suitable candidates. And here is where the advantage offered by specialized recruitment agencies matters the most.
How to choose the right recruitment agency?
There are many models of working with a recruitment agency, but at the end of the day everything boils down to a single aspect: cost. Most frequently, a fee is paid to the recruitment agency after the candidate is hired. Sometimes, agencies charge an up-front fee. In the second scenario, the prospective employer may want to determine a guarantee period or deadline for presenting a suitable candidate. If the agency fails to present a candidate before the deadline, the up-front fee is returned. Recruitment costs are substantial and may amount to a monthly salary of the specialist concerned, but remember; there is no such thing as “free” recruitment. Outsourcing recruitment is always a better option than having an in-house recruiter unsuccessfully looking for a suitable candidate for months or, even worse, making a bad hire.
The key factor is the agency’s professionalism as anything the recruiters will say and do to the candidates will have a direct impact on your company’s reputation in the eyes of your prospective employees. The good idea is to follow LinkedIn recruiters’ profiles. Checking their experience, especially IT-related, number and quality of contacts, reviews, posts, etc.
An advantage of in-house recruitment is the opportunity to make sure that a candidate shares the values represented by your company. You don’t have to lose this advantage while outsourcing the recruitment process. What’s important is that you and the recruiting agency should be on the same page from the very beginning. Both sides need to know exactly what kind of candidate you are looking for, which means you have to define the candidate’s skills, values, and professional ethics traits. The recruiter will evaluate the candidate’s professionalism, but it is you who will decide whether to hire or not. A good working relationship with a recruiting company is always built on good communication, so both parties should agree on all key points before the process starts.
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