Top 5 Reasons Why Every Hiring Manager Should Have a Search Firm as its BFF

By MFC Team

You might be wondering why businesses with an already existing internal recruitment team choose to work with search firms. The answers are simple; they help companies with challenges surrounding the hiring of a quality candidate, and employee turnover costs money—a lot of money. That’s why investment in the hiring process, on the front end, is the best way to ensure your business mitigates losses in the long run.

These are the top five reasons why every hiring manager should utilize a search firm.

Searches Cost Time and Money

Consider the resources allocated to your search. The time it takes to find the right person for the job can take weeks, even months, when trying to balance competing priorities. That’s time in which the perfect candidate may already be hearing from other employers. Conversely, spending too much time on the search can detract momentum from other projects deserving of your attention. Long story short, any amount of time spent sifting through candidate profiles is costing your company money. When your top executives and team are spending their time going through multiple rounds of candidate interviews, it’s keeping them from doing their job. Don’t let the menial phases of hiring eat up internal resources better spent elsewhere.

Search Firms do Their Research

Hiring the perfect candidate can be a very demanding process. The Harvard Business Review published a study delineating the actual cost of bad hiring decisions. When an employee leaves a company, the cost to the business amounts to over a fifth of their annual salary. In their findings, up to 80% of employee turnover instances are due to mistakes made in the hiring process. More often than not, the issues stem from more than just performance problems, but from a bad match in terms of skill set. Recruitment agencies have honed their ability to sniff out a bad fit. Hiring firms handle the preliminary stages of searching and screening potential new hires. They ensure that whoever has made it through the screening process has the perfect combination of experience, curiosity, and ambition for the position.

Firms Have a Massive Database

Through the process of screening thousands of potential employees, they’ve developed a keen sense of fit. Particularly in cases where the role a business seeks to fill is a new one, internal recruiters have a hard time determining the parameters and guidelines to work with. Hiring firms are exceedingly helpful in times like these. Not only have they hired for these roles before, they’ve also seen the way companies ultimately make their selections out of the candidates they’ve screened. Firms learn a lot about what qualifications and personality types are best suited for a given position through this process. Additionally, a firm’s database of potential new hires contains pre-existing contacts. Maybe the perfect addition for your team isn’t actively seeking out new work. Many great employees are likely to be already employed. If the firm reaches out to someone with whom they’ve had contact with in the past and asked them to be in touch about particular opportunities in the future, this is a potential source for exceptional talent that would have been completely inaccessible otherwise.

They are Your Partner in the Process

When a search firm partners with internal leadership, they’re able to coordinate efforts in a way that maximizes benefits for your business. Existing employees can lend useful background on what has worked in the past, and name challenges have arisen with previous hires. This cuts out the need for leadership to be at the table in early stages while also drawing on expertise that only recruitment firms have. Treating the relationship between internal hiring managers and external employment agency as one that fosters new ideas and personal advisement makes for a fully optimized and effective hiring strategy.

Screening and Hiring Candidates is a Search Firm’s Bread and Butter

The long and short of it is this; hiring agencies do this for a living. They cast a wider net, their access to candidates has a broader reach, and their expertise in this process is unmatched. You want only the best candidates for your business, and they are incentivized to provide you with talent that sticks. Search firms want return customers and they know the only way to keep you coming back is if you have sizable returns on your investment. Using metrics for success that have worked for businesses of all shapes and sizes across industries, you can rest assured every candidate will have undergone a rigorous screening process before they reach your doorstep.