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When you have a vacant position, we want it filled with a great candidate. There is a cost to that vacant position and the stress it places on the employees. In response, many employers offer their job openings to multiple non-exclusive recruiters believing they will reap the rewards of having these recruiters compete with each other. Employers believe they will receive high quality candidates faster and pay a lower recruitment fee with nonexclusive recruiters. Let’s take a look at that approach!
Do you base your hiring decisions on speed or quality?
Hiring multiple recruiters shifts the focus from quality to speed. When a recruiter is working on a nonexclusive basis, the focus is on getting the job done as quickly as possible. From that recruiter’s perspective, this is a race to submit as many candidates as quickly as possible. In the interest of speed, and in competition with other recruiters, the nonexclusive recruiter tends to be candidate centric and will submit candidates they already know and can find on the internet. They may even forego interviewing candidates in depth and submit them without ensuring they are qualified. After all, the nonexclusive recruiter who was the first to submit the hired candidate gets paid.
From the employer perspective, the recruitment process breaks down when the time and resources invested in reviewing, pre-screening and interviewing a large quantity of candidates submitted, many unqualified, slows down the recruitment process and increases the cost to the overall business. The competition among the recruiters shifts the focus from the client’s needs to quickly submitting the candidates.
Would you go to multiple accountants to prepare your taxes and agree to only pay the one who finished first? Even if that sound enticing, no professional would agree to work on this basis. Professionals want to be paid for performing their services well.
This creates a blind spot for the hiring company – they may not realize that recruiters with exclusive employer relationships are client centered; they take more time to understand the client’s needs and then identify, interview and submit only quality candidates that are qualified for the position. Ideally the retained recruiter will dedicate resources to the client so the recruitment process is quick without sacrificing the quality of the services performed.
Are you willing to work with someone who is not 100% committed to you?
Nonexclusive recruiters work for as many employers as possible and submit their candidates for as many open positions as possible hoping to get paid for a placement. Their focus is always to work as quickly as possible to increase the chances of earning a fee. This means that they are not 100% committed to any nonexclusive employer and the recruitment services are not tailored to the employer’s needs. Nobody wants to invest a great deal of time and effort and then not get paid because there is no real commitment.
From the employer’s perspective, the recruitment process can be frustrating when the candidates are rejected and the nonexclusive recruiters are reluctant to submit more candidates because they have moved on to submit their candidates to other employers. The employer’s blind spot is that the nonexclusive recruiters are submitting their candidates to every open job order and are not 100% committed to any nonexclusive employer.
When an employer and a recruiter are 100% committed to each other in an exclusive relationship, that commitment extends to getting the position filled with the right candidate for the client’s needs.
Are you willing to forego hiring the best candidate?
The unemployed and candidates dissatisfied with their current employment are always actively looking for work so they post their resume online and routinely email their resumes to every recruiter they find on the internet including LinkedIn. Nonexclusive recruiters who receive these resumes will submit them to all their current and future job orders hoping one or more will get hired. The nonexclusive recruiter will likely shop any highly desirable candidate to several employers hoping the candidate will get hired by the highest bidder.
From the employer perspective, the unemployed and dissatisfied employed candidates submitted are not necessarily the best candidate for the position but this is the pool of candidates from which to make the hiring decision. The employer’s blind spot is that it will never know if there are better candidates available from which to make the hiring decision.
A client centric recruiting firm will not be interested in those resumes available online that are being offered to every nonexclusive job opening. Instead, a client centric recruiting firm will invest the time and use their professional network to establish relationships with candidates who do not have resumes available on the internet.
Have you anticipated the unforeseen costs?
We all know the high cost of a bad hire so employers work hard to select the right candidate. Still, things can go wrong. And when they do, then what? A nonexclusive recruiter will generally offer a short guarantee period for their candidates; usually somewhere between 30 and 90 days. When the new hire does not work out after the short guarantee period, the employer will likely have to pay another recruitment fee for another candidate. The employer’s blind spot did not reveal the possibility of having to pay two recruitment fees for the same position and, even when the recruitment fee is lower, paying it twice makes it much higher than engaging in an exclusive relationship with a recruiter.
What happens when an employer hires a candidate and gets an invoice from two or more nonexclusive recruiters who each submitted that candidate? This happens so frequently that many large companies using nonexclusive recruiters have software programs to automatically reject duplicate candidates. The candidates have nothing to lose by posting on every internet site possible and submitting their resumes to multiple recruiters who are all submitting the same pool of candidates to all their open job orders.
The employer blind spot did not reveal the possibility of having two or more nonexclusive recruiters claiming the right to collect an invoice for the placement. It is likely that the candidate is already working in the new position when the invoices arrive so the employer will spend time and resources sorting out the submission of the candidate by each recruiter and the dispute may require costly litigation to resolve. In the alternative, the employer can avoid this entire dispute by hiring an alternative candidate instead. There is a significant cost to the multiple invoice dispute and to selecting an alternative candidate that was not the first choice.
An exclusive relationship with a recruiter ensures a 100% commitment to delivering higher quality candidates with no hidden costs.
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