Why do you need a recruiter in a recession?

There’s lots of people out there looking for a job. No doubt about it.

And there’s a drop in the number of companies hiring, and the volume of people they’re hiring – no doubt about that either.

So recruiting should be easy, right? Just put an advert up and let the excellent candidates roll in.

Well… no

There are three big assumptions in there. One – the people looking for work can do the job you’re hiring for. Two – using your own internal resources is more cost effective than engaging a third party. And three – the best person for you to hire is available and actively looking.

Engaging a recruiter in a candidate rich, noisy market brings a number of key advantages for companies:

You control your cost

You agree a fee or percentage, and that’s that. In contrast, putting an advert on and filtering hundreds of applicants, responding to them, arranging interviews, fielding questions – the cost of that is open ended. And recruiting is very time consuming indeed. Not engaging a specialist carries a huge opportunity cost.

You cover the whole market

Yes, people will apply. But how do you know how they compare to the people who didn’t see your ad? How do you know who you might have got? A good recruiter (hi!) will be actively talking to their network, directly approaching candidates, advertising and using a host of other channels to build a balanced list of candidates for you to consider. Limiting yourself to one channel, with no quality control, is risky

You get an expert

Someone who can help you define what you need, and create an engagement and attraction plan to secure them. Someone who will help you dig into your need and candidate motivation and can make a great hire.

Recessionary markets are radically different from growth markets. That much is true. And engaging and retaining talent is a very different experience in a recession = that much is also true. But working with an expert partner to secure the person you need – that’s always a good idea.

You can hear us talk more about this here.

At Vocative we work with customers and senior candidates in the data, technology and transformation space. We’d love to talk and see how we can help you – do get in touch.

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