For many organisations, recruitment has never been more difficult. Not for a lack of talent, but for the challenges faced in prising the best people away from their current roles.
Add to this that the best candidates are in high demand, then the competition is fiercer than ever. Organisations facing challenges to attract & retain talent (elitesearchsolutions.co.uk)
If you are hiring into your team and you want the most skilled people, you need to make sure your recruitment strategy is industry leading.
Many organisations will have an internal team which they will look to do everything through themselves, taking away the cost of an agency. Whilst this strategy appears the least costly method, it can prove more expensive and damaging in the long run if the right hires aren’t made. When you get into specialist skillset requirements, internal recruiters may not have the capacity or access to the right network of people to get the true best candidate for the job.
Plan B therefore may be to put the role out to the preferred supplier list of recruitment agencies that your organisation uses. However, in many cases, these will be large generalist agencies.
Even if a generalist recruitment agency claim to have specialist divisions, nothing compares to a pure out-and-out specialist recruiter who has spent many years honing their sourcing skills and gaining in depth market knowledge by immersing themselves in their sector specialism and nothing else.
Many organisations are encountering these challenges, therefore are recognising the need for recruitment agencies with niche specialisms. As such, specialist recruiters are in high demand and can therefore be selective with who they work with. If you want the best recruiters out there, they are likely not to be the cheapest and will likely request exclusivity.
The top tier recruiters will always prioritise their time and focus on an exclusive relationship. If your recruiter hasn’t asked you the ‘exclusivity’ question, then you should be concerned!
So why work exclusively with a specialist recruiter?
Time & Commitment - as we have mentioned before, talent is in high demand. It takes time to do quality work to reach the best talent. Recruiters need your commitment and will prioritise those that have given exclusivity over those that haven’t.
In return for your commitment, you can expect more invested time from a recruiter.
Focus on quality rather than speed – multi-agency recruitment can often be a race to the post first. Meaning sometimes recruiters may focus more on speed rather than the quality of the candidate. Having the time to do a thorough search knowing it isn’t a race to get the CV over the line first means that the final short list will be of higher quality and likely save you time from reviewing more CV’s of less relevance.
Exclusivity gives you quality over quantity!
Responsibility – If a recruiter knows they have exclusivity, then the success of the recruitment process lies firmly on their shoulders, therefore giving them accountability. Rest assured, a recruiter will go above and beyond for exclusive clients to ensure they deliver and maintain an exclusive relationship. Taking a call from a candidate for an exclusive client at the weekend? No problem. For a multi-agency client? Maybe that can wait till Monday!
More detailed screening – more time for the recruiter means better and more detailed briefing and screening of candidates including skills, experience, qualification and motivation assessment. Again, this will ensure better quality of final shortlist not just from more detailed screening but also more candidates being attracted to the role given the more detailed briefing and positive candidate experience they receive.
Simpler process – dealing with one recruiter is much easier than having multiple agencies filtering CV’s through and clogging your inbox up. Once an exclusive assignment is complete you will receive one shortlist and that shortlist should be sufficient in filling the role.
Recruitment doesn’t need to be time consuming!
Candidate experience – If a candidate is approached by an exclusive recruiter, it straight away gives a good first impression of your business. Much more professional than having multiple agencies phoning you up every 5 minutes with limited information.
An exclusive recruitment relationship will enhance your brand and candidate attraction ability.
Summary
If you are having difficulties hiring talent into your business, the key is to focus on your recruitment strategy. If you are using multiple recruiters, are you getting 100% effort and commitment from them?
If you are a non-exclusive client, the chances are you are lower down the priority list of your recruiters and will not get as much time and investment from them. If you think giving the role to lots of agencies will get more effort out of the recruiter, then the chances are you are mistaken in most situations and in fact it could go the opposite way.
To discuss how exclusivity in recruitment and a potential partnership with Elite Search may help your businesses recruitment challenges do not hesitate to reach out to discuss further
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