It takes a lot of time to build efficient recruitment processes and hire a team of in-house recruiters. That’s why a lot of companies choose to outsource staffing and hire recruitment agencies. However, there is a better option. Let’s find out why working with a staffing agency is bad and what are the other ways to save time and resources when it comes to hiring.
Staffing agencies: Their responsibilities and characteristics
Let’s start by defining what a staffing agency is and how it works. The main responsibility of such organizations is to find the right candidates for the job instead of the employers. Staffing agencies usually specialize in a certain industry and help companies find candidates with niche skills. After performing screening interviews, the agency finds possible fits for the position and refers them to the company.
Agencies manage all the paperwork, taxes, and contracts on behalf of the company. Staffing agencies charge fees to the clients depending on the amount of work. Usually, these companies charge 25% to 100% of the hired employee's wages plus additional fees for filling the position or a contract buyout.
According to FinancesOnline, 68% of recruiters said that their top challenge is sourcing candidates directly. Other popular difficulties were driving HR technology decisions or organizations: finding, attracting, retaining talent (56%), developing people to reach their full potential (43%), improving employee experience (42%), creating collaborative work environments (40%), workforce planning (38%), and ensuring well-being, diversity, & inclusivity (34%) (Pwc, 2020).
Many companies think that staffing agencies will help them overcome these challenges. However, it’s not often true. Let’s see what’s wrong with staffing agencies.
What’s wrong with staffing agencies
Before describing the alternative to the staffing agencies, let’s dig deeper into recruiting agency issues that may arise. Here are the main factors companies that use staffing agencies stated about their experience:
- It’s difficult to control the recruiting agencies. Companies cannot track how efficiently staffing agencies interview candidates, how much time they spend, and how they perform a background check.
- Recruitment agencies cannot describe the company culture and branding in the way in-house recruiters do. The process is often rushed and impersonal.
- Sometimes recruiting agencies edit the candidates CVs to make them more attractive.
- Recruiting agencies may give preference to candidates with higher salaries to get a higher fee for their work.
- Staffing agencies work with many companies simultaneously and don’t have time to dig deeper into your real needs. They may choose a great candidate in terms of skills and experience who is not suited to your company culture and team.
After receiving an initial message, determine if you're talking with someone who has actually done their homework on you. Can they tell you something they wouldn't have known without really looking into it (beyond browsing your company's careers page and public job listings)? It's not only a great differentiator but an indicator they're going to know your business, which is exactly what you want in a partner.
Evan Lassiter, Talent Acquisition Specialist at Contino
- This new recruitment strategy is expensive. Make sure to ask the staffing agencies about all the fees they apply to avoid any misunderstanding at the end of your cooperation.
Now that you know about the major agency problems, let’s see how Employa offers a great alternative.
The Employa way of making the hiring process more efficient
Employa is an AI recruitment tool that presents an easy way to hire better. It’s a smart recruiting assistant you can integrate with your existing ATS without buying additional software. Let’s see why Employa outperforms a new staffing agency.
AI-based recruitment automatically detects fraud.
Up to 78% of resumes are misleading and contain actual lies. Employa finds exaggerations in the candidate’s CV. The system can automatically reject resumes containing fraud.
It provides a better, transparent hiring process for both sides.
Employa invites recruiters to an Applicant Portal that contains a personal account for each candidate. These profiles display candidate progress through the process, answers to interview questions, and the candidate’s ranking among applicants.
You can create a unique filter and shortlist candidates in minutes with advanced search.
Companies can build their filters with criteria like experience, skills, and education. Moreover, businesses can also exclude educational institutions they deem suspicious and target particular skills and former employees of specific employers.
Employa identifies gaps in resumes and notifies candidates that they need to provide more information.
Moreover, Employa can get more information about applicants from social media and other external resources to create a more comprehensive picture.
Employa provides flexible payment plans depending on the size of your company.
Unlike the staffing agencies, which have a fixed fee, Employa’s pricing plans are affordable for each company and do not limit the set of features or the number of employees.
Why AI does it better than staffing agency: Benefits of AI for recruiting
Here are three main benefits of using AI in recruitment:
It allows automated candidate screening.
AI helps to automate repetitive, high-volume, and mundane tasks. AI-powered software uses data to standardize parts of the recruiting process. This frees up recruiters to focus on candidates’ experience, knowledge, and skills, and the job requirements. It decreases the time that talent acquisition specialists spend sifting through resumes—according to statistics, it’s about 23 hours for just one position. They focus on what matters. One of the examples of such AI tools is Hiretual that uses AI to help the talent sourcing team find and engage the right applicants. It aggregates people data from across the web that your recruiting team can query to create a shortlist of top talent.
AI helps improve communication with candidates
With AI, candidates can contact you at any time of the day, and a chat-bot representative will answer them at any time. There’s even a special form of AI that studies the behavior and character traits of the candidate and offers recommendations for effectively communicating with each candidate.
AI removes bias
The AI screening process is based on data points. It uses machine learning and analyzes a big quantity of data to make predictions about the best candidates for the position. Simply speaking, AI reduces the assumptions, biases, and mental fatigue that humans are susceptible to.
It is impossible to correct human bias, but it is demonstrably possible to identify and correct bias in AI. If we take critical steps to address the concerns that are being raised, we can truly harness technology to diversify the workplace
Frida Polli, a cognitive neuroscientist and the co-founder and CEO of Pymetrics