h2 Recruit is a specialist Sales Recruitment agency with offices in London and New York.

A breeze of change is blowing through the British business world. The country’s economic climate grows warmer month on month, giving new confidence to the thousands of firms that have struggled to weather the storm of the recession.

 

As such, many organisations are gearing up to hire for the first time in years. They include large, enterprise-scale operations with their own in-house recruitment and HR departments, but also Britain’s small and medium-sized businesses – a rapidly evolving subset of organisations that are finally tipped for growth.

 

But should these firms be turning to recruitment agencies when it comes to getting top talent on board? After all, challenging financial conditions have pushed them to be the best of the best – surely they’re better equipped to find the expertise they require than any third party or intermediary?

 

As it happens, there are plenty of reasons that recruitment agencies are still relevant in 2014, not to mention will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Here are five factors that make your agency number one when it comes to talent acquisition.

 

1. Using a recruitment agency cuts costs

 

First things first – using a third party for recruitment can deliver an organisation huge cost savings. Even outside of the expenses associated with developing a competent, knowledgeable in-house HR team, recruitment incurs overheads that are too big for many small and medium-sized business to bear – think advertising, or the time involved in training a less-than-ideal candidate.

 

Besides that, the recession has taught firms to be frugal and, more importantly still, agile. A critical aspect of business agility is knowing when to outsource a process. Should organisations really by lumbering themselves with in-house HR at the expense of focusing on things that really matter?

 

2. Recruiters are compliant

 

Another reason that using a recruitment agency remains a good idea is that many firms struggle to navigate fields such as employment law. New regulations are constantly coming into effect and it’s part of a competent recruiter’s job to keep pace with these changes so the client doesn’t have to.

 

3. It’s getting harder to find candidates

 

As Britain’s economic climate improves, more and more businesses are posting new vacancies and hunting high and low for permanent, temporary and contract staff. This has resulted in the candidate pool shrinking to unprecedented levels, despite record numbers of British workers also feeling liberated to jump ship from their jobs and take their talents elsewhere. Simply put, it’s getting harder for employers to find people to fill their posts.

 

This means it’s critical to get the experts involved. As we enter an age of skills shortages, the country’s best recruitment agencies are priming themselves for the crunch and developing networks of unparalleled value.

 

4. Some employees are agency-reliant

 

One a more practicable level, employees in some sectors have come to depend on recruitment agencies and, as a result, have established strong working relationships with them. This is particularly true of contract staff.

 

A recent survey by SJD Accountancy polled around 1,000 contingent workers, 40 per cent of whom worked in technology, and found the majority of them (39 per cent) had turned to recruitment agencies to secure their most recent contracts. This compares to just 18 per cent who contacted a client directly.

 

5. Recruitment agencies find better talent

 

Finally, it’s important to remember that if an organisation’s new to the hiring game, the chances are they simply won’t be as good at it as a dedicated recruitment agency. Today’s top-billing recruiters use every trick in the book to find talent, whether that’s searching for passive prospects on social media or posting eye-catching job ads to industry-specific boards.

 

Hiring new staff is costly. And even with pressure on organisations’ purse strings letting up a little as the economy improves, it’s important to make sure a recruitment campaign doesn’t turn out to be a costly mistake.

Source: www.sonovate.com