It’s a scene we all know. By Wednesday, you’ve posted a job opening and the best candidate is already making an offer on the job you posted elsewhere. It’s not because your company was not good or the pay not competitive. It’s just that in the current business environment, swiftness is the most significant currency and hesitation is the fastest losing.
We’ve had so many discussions with hiring managers that have them pulling their hair out about this scenario at Aptech Staffing, best staffing agency in USA. The war on talent is no longer a pay-for-play situation, it’s about who’s moving the fastest. When your internal hiring process is like being the person in the quicksand, and the market is running down the street, you’re not not only losing candidates, you’re giving them to your competitors.
So what do you need to do to change from a reactive hiring model to one that gets the best talent before you do? This is why a strategic staffing partnership takes the game to another level. Let’s dissect the reasons for the race to hire and the role that agencies of our kind play in helping you win.
If the hiring process is slow, it comes with an actual, though concealed, cost.
Let’s not jump to solutions yet, first of all, let’s discuss the true costs of putting things off. The initial pain point associated with a critical role opening up for weeks or months is typically “burn out”. You end up having to put all of that work into your current group, and after awhile, enthusiasm wanes and resentment sets in.
But, the harm is deeper. The best candidates are typically off the market in 10 days or less in a competitive market. When your resourcing process takes two weeks to simply go through the resumes, you are not only eliminating the unqualified candidates, you are eliminating the highly sought-after ones that have several things going on in their lives. They don’t wait. They see a slow process as a red flag—a sign of a disorganized company that is being bogged down in bureaucracy. Each additional day in your hiring cycle not only represents a delay, it’s a blow to your bottom line as well as your brand reputation.
A pre-heated bench can save you a lot of time.
Consider the typical hiring process. When there is a need, the need is approved, the job is posted and then the sourcing process begins. That’s a reactive cold start, and it’s the one most significant slowdown in the process.
That’s where the staffing agency model turns from the book. When you call us at Aptech Staffing, best staffing agency in USA, it is not from scratch. We keep connecting with, screening and developing a pool of passive and active candidates. Now imagine if you had one or two (or a hundred!) “pre-heated benched” professionals who had already completed their interviews, been skill-tested and already had their career goals formulated before you even had an opening.
When you say yes, then we’re not publishing a “wish you’d come” announcement. We’re already reaching out to people that we know can do it, who will be completely confidential. Not only is it quicker, but it is also a totally different way to work that can shave weeks off the “front end” of your hiring process, so you can outpace your competition that is still drowning in piles of unread resumes.
Cutting Through the Noise with Precision Matching
There is no point in speed if it’s not accurate. A series of ‘Almost, but not quite’ interviews are one of the time-consuming factors in the hiring process. While you may have a quick list of candidates, if that first three don’t work out for the hiring manager, you start over and the clock begins to tick all over again.
We are a most human filter. If you say you want a certain skill set, we will not just search our database for people with that skill. We drill down into the subtlety—the understated aspects that aren’t always stated in a job description. Are they the type of person who flourishes in the atypical and somewhat chaotic atmosphere of a start-up company, or do they prefer the disciplined pace of a company? Do they want to work from 9 to 5 to look after their family or are they motivated by the task of the job?
We don’t just conceive of your bullet-point needs, we really understand them, and that results in us bringing you 2 or 3 really dialed-in candidates rather than 2 dozen maybes. This precision drastically shortens the interview cycle. You don’t have to spend as much time interviewing, your hiring managers are in their job and you don’t have the opportunity for the candidate to lose his nerve or to have a counter offer.
The Audit-Proof Fast Track: Offloading Admin Overload
Don’t be afraid to be honest for a minute. This is only the beginning of the “finding people” part. Its ship-sinking weight rests in its administrative avalanche, which follows. All in all, with five interview calendars to keep track of, checks for compliance, confirming work history and orchestrating the delicate dance of the offer negotiation– hours and days slip away.
Once the process is transferred to a skilled recruiter, the entire process is shortened. We arrange the tactical gymnastics and your team only gets an invite to the calendar. These salty salary/CO conversations are often uncomfortable and we help build this cushion between the two while maintaining the positive dialogue and energy within the relationship. You don’t have to deal with the mute-to-dead time period if you’re in meetings back-to-back waiting 3 days for someone to give you feedback. If it’s a candidate-driven market, this type of operational pace puts you in the role of a top-tier, authoritative company.
Adaptability is a key competitive advantage. Flexibility is a competitive advantage.
The Bottom Line
In some cases, the urgency to turn to employment services is not a matter of a long void, but rather a boom in demand or a critical project that can’t be derailed. The “full-time-or-nothing” attitude can be a killer on speed. A flexible arsenal: a staffing partner like Aptech Staffing. You may bring in a high level contractor to get the job done on a project starting as soon as tomorrow, saving any loss of productivity as you take the time to find the perfect full-time executive.
This ‘try before you buy‘ function is arguably the ‘best speed hack‘ and is often known as ‘contract-to-hire‘. This eliminates the frustrating high-stakes decision for a permanent hire that must be made quickly.
