Creating a profitable and sustainable business requires a lot of hard work, dedication and persistence. Growing businesses face a range of challenges which need to be handled with great care if the business is to continue to expand and flourish. As a business grows, different problems and opportunities demand different solutions. It’s a fact that the majority of small businesses start off with a small team of people or even a single founder – which often results in failure to expand your team correctly. This could be due to fear of hiring the wrong people, people that might not have the best interest of the business at heart, people who claim to be experienced in the field that you hired them; yet sadly have lied to you. Hiring the wrong team could sink your business, it’s that simple. When the stakes are that high, you need to ensure that each of your new hires is a passionate, engaged and committed team player.
That’s when you need to turn towards the assistance of professional recruitment consultants. A professional consultant assists employers to find suitable staff for their businesses. Whether you are looking for permanent or temporary positions to be filled, the consultant will have a carefully selected database of candidates available for your exact needs. They interview, test skills and check any supporting documents to ensure that the candidates looking for work, really do possess the skills and experience that they say they do. Often recruitment consultants have specialist fields, such as sales recruitment consultants. These specialist fields help narrow down the correct candidates for your exact needs.
How hiring the wrong people can harm your business
A single misstep could cost your business money, several mistakes when hiring could be fatal to your business in more ways than one.
Staff are one of the most valuable assets of your business. Your team is what determines if your business will continue to flourish, or go down the tubes.
Don’t micromanage
To grow your business, you need to learn to delegate properly, trusting your management team and giving up day-to-day control of every detail. This will be particularly important as your business grows and becomes more complex. Enlisting the assistance of recruitment consultants to source out suitable candidates will cut time, which will means cutting costs. Part of their job is screening and shortlisting candidates before employers interview them. The screening process takes up countless hours of work.
Help from professional consultants
As your business grows, you may need to bring in outsiders to help. You’ll want to delegate responsibility for particular areas to different specialists. As you start tackling a new opportunity, someone who has experience of that activity can be vital. Hiring is a daunting task, and there are very real costs associated with recruiting. Many growing businesses make the mistake of wasting precious time and resources searching for candidates by themselves. The longer the search, the higher the costs per hire.
Costly mistakes
Searching for employees without a recruitment consultant might cost your business as much as 2000 GBP.
Before bringing just anyone on board, you need to understand that extra manpower entails a whole new string of legal obligations, liabilities, expenses and, of course, paperwork.
Saving time, saving money
Businesses big or small turn to recruitment consultants to come in and provide their opinion, their assistance and their services. Because recruitment consultants work thoroughly to select the very best candidates for your business, all you will have to do is sit back and preview the information they have painstakingly prepared for you. This way you know that every candidate that you interview for the position you have available, is worth your time. Why spend hours, days or even weeks interviewing hundreds of people, which more than 85% will turn out to be a waste of your precious time. If you have every gone through this process, then you know what it feels like having to scan through hundreds of CV’s, telephone inquiries, emails and face to face inquiries. All that can be bypassed by simply hiring a recruitment consultant.
Connecting people
Recruitment consultants are the most people based business out there. The best recruitment consultants are the most connected ones. So when choosing a recruitment consultant try and explore how well networked they are. You can view this on their website, which should have links to social media such as, twitter, blogs, Facebook and LinkedIn. How many followers, how many years in the industry, key clients, all these factors contribute to how well the recruitment consultant will fulfil your needs.
The right people for your business – Sales Specialists and more
A recruitment consultant is the intermediary between organisations. For example, if you are looking to fill one or several sales positions within your growing company; hiring sales recruitment consultants will offer you a certain degree of certainty when selecting a candidate. The advice and expertise of sales recruitment consultants means that you will receive the “cream of the crop” when it comes to any single selected field. Recruitment consultants who specialise in a certain field, such as sales specialists, build long-term relationships with both candidates and businesses. They create an excellent reputation for themselves, becoming extremely knowledgeable in their field of expertise. Working closely with each business to give them advice on the most vital part of their organisation – People. People are what drive a company forward and make it successful. Recruitment Consultants shape the future of the corporate world.
Family values
Many small businesses have a strong sense of family within the work space. They consider each person they work with to be an extended family member. Sometimes they might even be family! This makes bringing new people into this “Family” a delicate process. This is not only difficult for you but sometimes for the new member of staff that will most definitely feel the bond between the existing “Family”.
Selecting the right recruitment consultant for you
Some candidates are hard to find. They may be passive or they may be selective. Maybe your business is a niche that not many people are experienced in or hold the right skill set. If they aren’t responding to the job advertisements that you have placed, don’t worry. More often than not, talented or skilful people searching for work may have relationships with trusted specialist recruiters in your sector. Even if they aren’t currently active, there’s a strong chance that a good recruiter will know who they are and how to reach them. Agencies have many networks – each consultant, candidate, client or collaborator has the potential to leverage their networks to help connect you to people with a range of skills and experiences, many of who would be off the radar of an in-house team or hiring manager.
Knowledge of the market
The best recruiters will have their finger on the pulse of their specialist markets, and can give the hiring team insight in to what is happening. They should know the available talent, where they are and how to reach out to them, salary rates, career expectations, available skill-sets and current hiring complexities. If other businesses are struggling to find the same people as you they should be able to advise on alternative solutions. The best will act as partners and collaborators, and should still be your eyes and ears in the market.
Many consultancies or agencies remain industry specific, or are subdivided into industry specific sections so that the consultant is recruiting similar posts within different clients.
Just like you need your accountant to handle your business’s finances and bring you the very best tax deductions etc., you will need the assistance of a professional recruitment consultants to handle the lengthy and resource consuming task of suitable staff recruitment.
The bottom line is if you have a business that is expanding and you need skilful and reliable staff to grow even further with, don’t go it alone – hire a professional, like sales recruitment consultants are, to help build your business with the right people.
