The Benefits of Using a Specialist Recruiter to Find Talent
Businesses work with a recruiter to save time and money on talent acquisition. However, niche areas with specialist skill requirements will benefit from using a specialist talent partner.
Securing exceptional talent can be a slow and costly process but outsourcing this to a specialist recruiter can lead to fast hires, cost savings, and improvements in staff turnover. There is a plethora of benefits to working with a specialist recruiter to find candidates and make smart hires.
What is a specialist recruiter?
A specialist recruiter focuses on sourcing talent within a certain industry, niche, or specific skill, such as knowledge of a specific type of data, category, channel or customer, and are also useful for industries which require some technical knowledge of job requirements such as category & insights, commercial strategy and RGM.
They may also have deep knowledge of the geographical location, and will know where to identify crossover talent from other industries. Specialist recruiters can also pull on their niche expertise to provide guidance on market trends such as salary expectations, desirable skill sets, emerging areas, and employee expectations. This has been achieved through years of building relationships and researching candidates – incredibly valuable knowledge to tap into.
Help with specific and hard-to-fill roles
Sectors such as FMCG can hold roles with very specific requirements and have small talent pools to choose from. Roles with ‘essential to have’ skills which are rare in the market are best placed with a specialist recruiter. They can source talent with these unique skills from the network and relationships to headhunt exceptional candidates. Specialist recruiters can also quickly identify and disqualify unsuitable candidates who do not fit these essential requirements, saving hiring managers valuable time.
Cut costs & speed up the process
One of the most important benefits to hiring a talent specialist is lowering recruitment costs. Savings come from cutting out time in the recruitment cycle and using in-house recruitment who may still lack the relationships needed to make specialist hires. Hiring quickly saves money in terms of added employee value and the cost of advertising a role for a long period. Fast hiring usually happens more often with specialist recruiters as they will already have a pool of qualified candidates to speak to.
They can develop your candidate brief
If you know a new role is required but are not quite sure how to place it, specialist recruiters can use their market and competitor knowledge to help you develop roles and candidate briefs from scratch. Recruiters will have knowledge of the intricacies of how your sector functions and will be able to speak your ‘language’.
Specialist recruiters recognise the challenges which affect your industry and will be able to help you develop a candidate brief and employer value proposition which can attract high quality candidates. They will have ideas and solutions around your recruitment process which are worth listening to and are informed by deep expertise.
Avoid bad hires
Hiring the wrong candidate for a role can be expensive; specialist recruiters will spend extra time and effort on ensuring a hire is not only suitable for the role but a cultural fit. Bad hires are avoided by specialist recruiters via methods such as consulting on your role brief, benchmarking salary offers, to screening candidates throughout the process. The cost of a bad hire can be even worse than employers first anticipate, with demotivation and poor work performance often proving contagious; and high staff turnover lowering productivity and morale.
Using a specialist partner means access to new and modern searching and hiring methods, such as data collection and analysis via psychometric tests and video interview screening. Candidate assessments based on psychometric or situational tests are used to measure softer skills such as emotional intelligence and attitudes towards certain aspects of the workplace. They are an advanced way to ensure a candidate is a positive culture fit and provides insight into their learning and leadership styles.
Access a wide talent pool
A leading advantage of using an expert recruiter for your hire is their extended reach across the available talent pool. Alongside candidates actively looking for new opportunities, niche recruiters have access to a passive talent pool. This access to potential candidates across your sector will ensure the best talent available can be sourced and snapped up.
An industry-specific recruiter will know your sector through spending time speaking with candidates and clients on a daily basis, this knowledge, alongside insights from your competitors, helps further build passive specialist talent pools.
Build a relationship for future hires
Relationships built between companies and niche recruitment consultants are often long-term and high value. Recruiters can provide you with information on trends, and keep you updated with new talent in the area, from manager to director level. The more a recruiter learns about your business, its growth, development, culture, and preferences, the faster a recruiter will be at sourcing ideal candidates. A recruiter can act as a consultant on business strategy even beyond the sourcing and hiring process.
If you would like help with a specific role, please get in touch to arrange a call.