The Third-Party Professor

A company’s most valuable resource is the staff that makes up the day to day operations of the organization.  When a position becomes open, what if that position needs to be filled quickly to keep the workload balanced for everyone?  What happens if that new hire is filled with the wrong person? What happens if that new hire creates friction between other employees and staff?  What happens if you are not attracting the right candidates?

The hiring process can be arduous and very time consuming.  Rushing the hiring process, cutting corners and not vetting your candidates, not being able to advertise on multiple job sites, not reaching the right audience, getting hundreds of unqualified resumes, not fitting into the company culture, people not being truthful about their job experiences and skill sets, and hiring someone who is already looking for their next job are all great concerns. I could go on and on.  These are all real problems a company faces every day in their recruiting and hiring process.

Hiring the wrong candidates can cripple your company’s performance, destroy moral, and create internal struggles that weren’t there before. Hiring the wrong candidates can eventually cause the demise of your company.  Every organization has their stars and weak links, and usually the jobs that require strong leadership or complex skill sets are more critical to fill than others.

What if you could wave your magic hiring wand and five candidates would appear on your doorstep waiting to be interviewed.  This would make your company and life very simple, wouldn’t it?  In certain economic climates and regions of the country, this does happen for some jobs.  When this situation does happen, it can save a company a ton of money because they were able to fill the positions internally and they can sometimes bring in someone at a lower wage.

But what happens when you have a hard to fill position?  Maybe, you just trained someone and they got hired right out of the company or they saw greener pastures elsewhere.  Or the skill sets of the person required don’t bring up the right candidates for the position?

A Typical Recruiter

What happens when you are looking for a specialized skill set and that person isn’t on a job board or in the job pool where you are advertising.  Maybe that person isn’t reading the New York Times and hasn’t put his resume on Career Builder or looked at your website.  Or what happens if your internal recruiters have too many jobs to fill and can’t manage their open positions.

When going through the hiring process, smaller and mid-size companies can run into problems with manpower, resource, advertising budgets and time issues.   The recruiting expertise could be lacking, the recruiting resources could be lacking, taking the time to thoroughly check references and getting a detailed behavioral analysis on each candidate from peers and previous managers might be lacking.  Creating a candidate summary for the hiring manager saves him time and makes it easy  for the manager to compare the candidate to other candidates or compare the candidate’s qualifications to the job description.   Why aren’t you requesting a summary for every candidate?

For some companies, their advertising dollars and time is better spent with a third-party recruiter who is an expert in finding candidates with the specific skill sets, experiences, education and training that they are looking for.   This is why large, mid-size and small companies continue to use third-party recruiters to fill their open positions.

Today more than ever Managers have less time and are overworked.  There is still a strong demand for alternative sources where a company can use a third party recruiter’s experience, expertise, and database to vet out the best professionals where the cream can rise to the top.

A great third-party recruiter will create trusting relationships with employers and find the best fit between candidates and employers by using several sources.  The third-party recruiter will first use his candidate database of over a million candidates.  He will then source from popular databases such as Monster, Careerbuilder, and Dice.  Social networking is becoming more popular and finding passive candidates becomes easier everyday with the information on the internet.

Strong, dynamic, passive candidates that don’t broadcast their situation on-line are a premium resource.  A person who spends all their time working is a better target then someone who spends all their time networking.  Even with all the new recruiting systems and productivity tools that parse resumes and help employers and recruiters find candidates, there is still nothing better than the old-fashioned telephone and a sincere conversation that begins a new relationship.  A match must benefit both the employer and the candidate for a recruiter to truly be successful.

Mark Oppenheim
Senior Technical recruiter / Account Manager
Resource Spectrum
www.resourcespectrum.com
732-582-8390