Benefits of Partnering With a Specialist Staffing Agency
When hiring for technical jobs, it’s easy for HR departments to become overwhelmed. The longer it takes to fill an open position, the more strain there is between HR and the hiring manager, too.
Then, as HR desperately try to source suitable candidates, all that occurs is that poor-quality candidates slip through the net. The HR department gets busier, and the hiring manager becomes more frustrated. The relationship between the two is stretched to breaking point.
Does this scenario sound familiar to you?
Here’s why this happens, and how partnering with the right staffing agency can help.
Why Does Your HR Department Get Burned Out When Hiring for Technical Jobs?
The HR department’s job is to find the right talent for the company. But when it comes to technical jobs, they have a hard time finding the right candidate. This causes anxiety, frustration, and, ultimately, burnout in your HR team. Here are a few factors that contribute to this burnout:
Ineffective Job Descriptions Attract the Wrong Candidates
Effective job descriptions are crucial. A well worded job description is the sales document that attracts the quality candidates you need. But the lack of technical knowledge within an HR department often leads to ineffective job descriptions.
Ambiguity and poorly specified responsibilities, experience, and qualifications, coupled with a lack of “what’s in it for me?” doesn’t appeal to those candidates who could make a difference to your company’s tech capability.
Seeking the ‘Perfect Candidate’
The HR department have walked this road before. They’ve presented who they considered to be great candidates, but the hiring manager has dismissed each one. So, now the HR team is looking for the perfect candidate, who ticks all the boxes. They don’t have the technical knowledge to spot candidates who are adaptable and flexible in their roles. Instead, they reject all who do not possess the exact requirements set out by the hiring manager.
With greater technical knowledge, HR would have been better positioned to fully understand requirements and negotiate the list of required and nice-to-have skills and qualifications.
In a Competitive Market, You’re Using the Wrong Hiring Channels
The tech talent you need do not hang out on the same jobs boards as other folk. Your HR may have a great track record of hiring for admin roles, accounting jobs, and back-office staff, but when it comes to professionals in tech and creative positions, the most talented candidates use different job channels and approaches to job seeking. When your HR team directs so much effort in the wrong places, three things happen:
- You get overwhelmed with poor-quality candidates
- Your retention rates drop because of poor fit
- The ineffective effort your HR team puts in burns them out
Interview, Vetting, and Admin Burnout
When your HR department advertises through the wrong channels, you are likely to receive many poor-quality applications. But in the desperation to fill the vacant tech job, the HR department books increasing numbers of vetting interviews, which must all be coordinated and administered. Candidates must also be vetted, and background checks carried out.
All this takes time and huge effort. This is especially true if conducting technical assessments. This time means your HR people can get behind with other tasks, and that increases their stress levels and workloads even further.
Non-Technical HR Professionals Don’t Get the Support They Need
In a perfect world, hiring managers or others with an appropriate technical background would be highly engaged in the hiring process from the get-go. But this often isn’t the case. Having given a job spec to HR, the hiring manager is often too busy to be involved in early-stage recruitment processes ─ and so all the initial work is left to underqualified HR staff.
Why Partnering With a Staffing Firm Improves the Health of Your HR Team
When you partner with a technical staffing firm, you’ll very quickly experience many benefits that contribute to the health of your HR team.
A specialist staffing agency whose recruiters have technical backgrounds and recruitment expertise will be able to discuss your job openings in detail with hiring managers. This is especially relevant if you’re hiring for a new role in which the hiring manager doesn’t have the same technical background or knowledge.
You’ll also find that the staffing firm will benefit from a highly targeted network of active and passive candidates, developed over many years. And should their network not include the candidates you need to interview directly, the staffing firm will use its existing contacts to reach out as well as advertise through specialist channels and employing other search and select strategies (such as deep-dive searches using LinkedIn).
Because the staffing firm’s success depends upon your hire being a success, you’ll also find that the staffing firm will use advanced candidate screening and vetting processes, and test for technical capabilities.
The outcome? You’ll be presented with a handful of hand-picked candidates who are ideally suited to the role, your company, and the team into which you are hiring. Candidates who will add value to what you do will be retained for the long term. Your HR team will have more time to focus on filling the jobs that they do so well, be less stressed, and internal relationships will improve.
Whatever the type of hiring you need (contract, contract-to-hire, or direct hire), for the health of your HR department, isn’t it time you partnered with a specialist staffing firm for your technical and creative jobs?
Contact TECHEAD today to discover the tangible difference we make to our clients and their HR departments.