You will have needed to miss every news bulletin on TV and Radio over the last couple of months to not know about shortages of labour and increased vacancy number in the UK. However, it’s not just HGV drivers, fruit pickers and hospitality staff that are in short supply.
According to the latest Royal Bank of Scotland Report on Jobs, released on October 8th, the industries with the highest rate of vacancies were the IT and computing sectors, followed by engineering and construction, and then the accountancy and financial sectors.
In fact, it’s an almost perfect storm with September seeing Job Vacancies at a near record high at the same time as businesses are reporting the second-fastest decline of applicants for permanent jobs since records began in 2008.
Maybe you usually handle your recruitment requirements directly with no requirement for external assistance. Under normal situations, placing an advert online and waiting for a few potentially suitable candidates to apply isn’t too taxing and shouldn’t take up too much of your time. However, with less candidates applying at the moment, and far more jobs for them to apply to, there’s no guarantee that the usual approach will work.
Reactive processes like online adverts might not yield the results you’re looking for.
Maybe you have a database of candidates that have applied to you over the last few years. If so, you could spend some time sifting through those candidates and speaking to them about your vacancy. But unless recruitment is your only responsibility, do you have the time to proactively search for candidates?
What then?
A Recruiters job is to build relationships with candidates who are both active and passive on the job market. They will have access to candidates who maybe aren’t actively pursuing new opportunities but have told their Recruiter to let them know when a potentially suitable position becomes available. Those passive candidates won’t know about your online advert, as they aren’t searching online for a new role.
As mentioned above, time is the other resource that you possibly don’t have enough of, if your own job involves anything other than recruitment. A Recruiter can dedicate the time to proactively source candidates for you. Searching their own company database of candidates as well as online databases, social media, and other on and offline sources.
If you have ever wondered what a recruiter has done to justify their recruitment fee, below is a fairly comprehensive list of activities for a typical contingency recruitment project.
And until number 27 is completed, it won’t have cost you a penny!