Businesses work with a recruiter to save time and money on talent acquisition. However, sectors with competitive labor markets and specialist skill requirements, such as engineering or life sciences, will benefit from using a specialist talent partner.
Securing exceptional talent can be a slow and costly process but outsourcing this to a specialist recruiter can lead to fast hires, cost savings, and improvements in staff turnover. There is a plethora of benefits to working with a specialist recruiter to find candidates and make smart hires.
What is a specialist recruiter?
A specialist recruiter focuses on sourcing talent within a certain industry, niche, or specific skill, such as knowledge of a programming language. Talent specialists are also useful for industries which require some technical knowledge of job requirements and qualifications needed, for example the pharma and supply chain sectors.
They may also have deep knowledge of a local area and will know where to identify crossover talent from other industries. Specialist recruiters can also pull on their niche expertise to provide guidance on market trends such as salary expectations, desirable skill sets, new technologies, and employee expectations. This has been achieved through years of building relationships and researching candidates โ incredibly valuable knowledge to tap into.
Help with specific and hard-to-fill roles
Many professional sectors such as tech and financial services hold roles with very specific requirements and have small talent pools to choose from. Roles with โessential to haveโ skills which are rare in the market are best placed with a specialist recruiter. They can source talent with these unique skills from the databases and relationships built to headhunt exceptional professionals. Specialist recruiters can also quickly sift through and reject unsuitable job applications which do not fit these essential requirements, saving you time.
Cut costs & speeds up the process
One of the most important benefits to hiring a talent specialist is lowering recruitment costs. Savings come from cutting out time in the recruitment cycle and using in-house recruitment who may still lack the relationships needed to make specialist hires. Hiring quickly saves money in terms of added employee value and the cost of advertising a role for a long period. Fast hiring usually happens more often with specialist recruiters as they will already have a pool of suitable candidates to contact.
They can develop your candidate brief
If you know a new role is required but are not quite sure how to place it, specialist recruiters can use their market and competitor knowledge to help you develop roles and candidate briefs from scratch. Recruiters will have knowledge of the intricacies of how your sector functions and will be able to speak your โlanguageโ.
Specialist recruiters recognize the challenges which affect your industry and will be able to help you develop a candidate brief and employer value proposition which can attract high quality candidates. They will have ideas and solutions around your recruitment process which are worth listening to and are informed by deep expertise.
Avoid bad hires
Hiring the wrong candidate for a role can be expensive; specialist recruiters will spend extra time and effort on ensuring a hire is not only suitable for the role but a cultural fit. Bad hires are avoided by specialist recruiters via methods such as consulting on your job brief, benchmarking salary offers, to screening candidates throughout the process. The cost of a bad hire can be even worse than employers first anticipate, with demotivation and poor work performance often proving contagious; and high staff turnover lowering productivity and morale.
Using a specialist agency means access to new and modern searching and hiring methods, such as data collection and analysis via psychometric tests and video interview screening. Candidate assessments based on psychometric or situational tests are used to measure softer skills such as emotional intelligence and attitudes towards certain aspects of the workplace. They are an advanced way to ensure a candidate is a positive culture fit and provides insight into their learning and leadership styles.
Accessing a wide talent pool
A leading advantage of using an expert recruiter for your hire is their extended reach across the available talent pool. Alongside registering actively seeking candidates, niche recruiters have access to a passive talent pool. This access to potential candidates across your sector will ensure the best talent available can be sourced and snapped up.
Your specialized recruiter will know your sector through attending trade shows and conferences, sponsoring sector awards, and getting involved in industry organizations. This knowledge, alongside insights from your competitors, helps further build passive specialist talent pools.
Build a relationship for future hires
Relationships built between companies and niche recruitment consultants are often long-term and high value. Recruiters can provide you with information on trends, and keep you updated with new talent in the area, from graduate to director level. The more a recruiter learns about your business, its growth, development, culture, and preferences, the faster a recruiter will be at sourcing ideal candidates. A recruiter can act as a consultant on business strategy even beyond the sourcing and hiring process.
If you would like assistance for your talent challenges, please complete the form below and one of our specialist talent consultants will give you a call.
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