No employer considers their hiring process to be a casual affair. But sometimes their actions suggest otherwise.
Do you make this classic mistake?
Before we reveal what this mistake is, you need a little background.
One of GrassGreener Group’s key USPs is our free replacement guarantee. Basically, if we place a candidate with you and, for whatever reason, things don’t work out, we’ll run the recruitment campaign again without charge.
This is fairly standard practice for recruiters, but what makes us stand out is the LENGTH of our guarantee.
Typical guarantees usually cover 1-2 months. A well heeled firm might go somewhere between 3 to 6 months.
But our guarantee generally STARTS at six months and extends up to 12 months for senior positions. In some instances, for very senior roles, we’ve stretched this for up to TWO YEARS.
We take on the risk.
This is a hugely valuable part of our service because it takes away all the risk from our clients. By using our recruiting service you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.
But what does this have to do with the classic recruitment mistake I mentioned earlier?
It’s to do with HOW we’re able to offer a lengthy guarantee.
The only reason we can do this without risking going broke is because, for the candidates we place, we have a 96% retention rate after 12 months. We can offer an industry-leading guarantee because we know that, most of the time, our clients will never need to use it.
We accomplish this high retention rate because we use the i-intro® method of recruitment. It involves careful consultation, in-depth candidate assessment and solid after care. And recruitment at this standard of professionalism can only be accomplished when we’re hired on a retained basis.
THAT is the mistake that employers make so frequently. Thinking that hiring several recruitment firms on a contingency basis will produce better results than hiring one recruitment firm on a retained basis.
The idea of having several recruiters find candidates and only paying the winner sounds good in theory, but in practice it just creates a scrum – a mad, uncoordinated riot where it’s all about who can fit a round peg into a square hole the fastest.
Recruiters that work on a contingency basis know that success is more likely through speed than quality. So they have no choice but to cut corners.
That doesn’t make for a good recruitment process and it’s why contingency recruiters rarely offer lengthy guarantees. If they offer one at all.
Every time you hire a recruiter to help you fill a position you can opt for speed or you can opt for quality. But you can’t have both.
If you care about your recruitment, you will always choose the latter and retain a single firm to provide you with a quality campaign.
Speed, deep networks, good communication are great assets in a recruitment firm. But unless your new hires are performing well enough to stay in their job for years, all of that is irrelevant.
Neither you or the candidates benefit when the relationship falls apart after only a few months.
If you want your hires to stick, if you want guarantees and if you care about the quality of your recruitment campaigns, working with a recruiter on a retained basis is essential.
For a no-obligation discussion about how we can help you save time and money on your next recruitment campaign, click here