Busting 5 Myths About Full-Service Recruiting Firms

Is your company’s hiring policy a means to an end, or a means to a beginning?

In other words: are you hiring simply to fill positions, or are you seeking the right individuals who can help the company improve its overall performance and exceed its goals?

We live in an era when employees across the board are being stretched thin as companies balance productivity with pressures on the bottom line. This struggle weighs particularly heavily on human resources professionals, who are responsible for managing a company’s largest cost center – its workforce – while being forced to do more with less.

This push and pull has led a growing number of companies to explore the use of professional recruiting firms — generally as complements to their existing HR departments — as a means of ensuring the hiring of highly qualified and skilled employees.

These explorations typically turn up some common myths surrounding recruiting firms, all of which can be easily debunked. The most common include:

1. Recruiting Firms Are Too Expensive

In reality, many recruiting firms offer contingency-based searches and/or guarantees. With contingency-based searches, employers need not pay a dime until the recruiting company has filled the position with a skilled and qualified candidate.

Moreover, many employers that use recruiting firms find that they save big on hiring costs — and these saving more than pay for the services of recruiting firms.

2. When You Use a Recruiting Firm, You Lose Control of the Hiring Process

Recruiting firms don’t necessarily come in and take over the entire hiring process. Rather, they usually work right alongside with a company’s HR department. Good recruiting firms don’t take control away from HR; instead, they become trusted advisors during the hiring process. Ultimately, it is the employer itself that calls all the shots and makes the final hiring decisions — not the recruiting firm.

3. Recruiting Firms Are Too Industry Specific

Sure, some recruiting firms offer niche services for very specific roles and industries, but other recruiting firms are capable of handling a wide variety of open reqs for companies in all industries. You can find a recruiting firm that suits your hiring needs, no matter the role you’re looking to fill.

4. Recruiting Firms Poach or Steal Talent

If you’re worried about poaching or stealing talent, there are a variety of contracts and agreements — such as non-compete clauses — that can discourage or prohibit this practice. Poaching talent is not crucial to the world of recruiting firms.

5. Recruiting Firms Only Offer Temporary Hiring Solutions

The majority of recruiting firms offer blends of temporary, full-time, and direct-hire services. Some recruiting firms even offer “guarantees” on candidates: if a new hire doesn’t work out, the firm will help you find another candidate to fill the role. You can forge a relationship with a recruiting firm that suits your company’s specific needs — whether those needs are short or long term.

In truth, the benefits of using a professional recruiting firm are many, including savings in costs and time, increased flexibility, access to talent and recruiting resources, and mitigation of hiring risks. Amid the growing pressures on corporate HR professionals, there has never been a better time to investigate whether a recruiting firm is right for your company.