Sourcing the best talent, especially when a business is looking for a specific skillset in a particular field like the IT domain, can often seem to be an arduous task. Elite performers in this field can act as game-changers for any organization that is lucky enough to have them onboard. However, for an organization’s internal recruiting team, pulling this talent is completely possible but there’re several limitations in the process that may lead to less than expected results.
So what’s the best way to source top talent consistently, especially when you’re operating in a diverse field like IT? IT recruiters appear to be the top choice as they have what it takes to get the best talents suited to your job profiles. If you’re wondering why you should engage the services of specialist IT recruiters, keep on reading. Here, we’ve outlined the key factors that set these people apart from a company’s internal recruiters when it comes to recruiting the best talent.
Robust understanding of actual job requirement
The first advantage of collaborating with third-party recruiters is they come with solid understanding of the actual job requirements. While your in-house recruiters can certainly have this knowledge, they rarely get the chance to apply it. As a result, many internal recruiters over-rely on experience, compensation and skills to filter talents, eliminating diverse and high potential talents from consideration. On the flip side, recruiters understand who’s who in this field and thus, source candidates based on their comprehensive market knowledge.
Cost-effective
IT recruiters hold the ability to pare down the time to hire as well as the resulting opportunity cost. Engaging your internal resources to find top talents can be extremely time-consuming and costly to your business. On the other hand, recruiters help you throughout the hiring process – from developing candidate brief to shortlisting them to cherry-picking the best ones based on your feedback. This reduces the time to hire significantly as you’ll only interview candidates who meet your requirements. While some companies may feel hesitant to incur the expense of engaging third-party recruiters, this cost often becomes far less than the potential revenue generated by a top talent.
Access to specialized networks
Using specialist IT recruiters means you get immediate access to their talent pool, which they have built over the years after investing significant effort and time. In addition, they remain heavily active in their respective community of specialization, and not just recruitment. From attending industry events to promoting the domain to staying active across various online communities to being members of industry organizations – you will find their ubiquitous presence where it counts. All of these offer them access to active and passive networks of talent, whom they can contact for potential opportunities. This brings out talents that you (or your in-house team) may not have been able to find otherwise.
Deep expertise
The extensive experience of specialist IT recruiters in filling positions with top talents means that they’ve possibly carved out the most useful ways and benchmarks for the process. In addition, they’re usually quite capable of managing time-sensitive hiring requirements that need to onboard the best talents quickly. Drawing on their extensive market knowledge, these recruiters are able to offer valuable advice on key trends in terms of attracting talents and can even see the bigger picture that helps you in recruiting the top talents.
Help in developing employer value proposition
In today’s IT job landscape, it has become immensely crucial to cultivate your employer brand. If you fail to do it right, you can run into the risk of not attracting the top talents. While big names sometimes devote significant attention and time to cultivate their employer brand, it’s usually overlooked by a majority of IT organizations. Usually, high caliber candidates have multiple job offers when they look to switch organizations. It is crucial to build a robust employer value proposition and communicate this effectively in order to ensure that those candidates prefer your organization over your competitors. Specials recruiters can market this proposition to potential candidates by strengthening your employer value, thus convincing top talents to pick your company as their employer whenever they plan to make a switch.
Expedited vacancy fill
The opportunity costs of open positions can be huge. According to studies, in profitable organizations, an employee usually generates three to five times his/her annual salary in value. So, leaving a $100,000 position, which needs only the best talent open for only one month means losing anywhere from $300,000 to $500,000 that you’ll never see again. Specialist recruiters focus their efforts on the likelihood of a positive outcome (“yes” from the candidate) when you eventually make the offer to him/her. This is the specific point where most in-house recruiters don’t have the skills needed to coach a top talent.
Final Takeaway
Engaging specialist IT recruiters with the above competencies should be an integral part of your organization’s talent acquisition program. However, you should try not to compel these recruiters to comply with your internal processes or rules that may negate their unique prowess. Instead, try to leverage their abilities to promote hiring of the best talents on a continual basis.
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