How to Find the Right Staffing Partner

WinMax Blog Team

12 July 2021
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Anyone running any kind of business will agree to the fact that the employees of the business are one of the most, if not the most, important resources. People often consider them to be just a cost. But the truth is that your human resource can be an investment that keeps paying for a long time.

And yet, finding the right people for your team is one of the hardest things out there. Add in a shortage of technical talent, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for trouble. At times like these, what businesses really need is the right staffing partner to help recruit the right talent for their organization. Here’s how you can find such a partner. 

Assess Their Flexibility

Especially when you are facing a shortage of technical talent, it’s important to find a staffing partner that is flexible. There are several reasons behind this. When it comes to recruiting technical talent, things are often progressing very rapidly.

There might be new skills emerging or new competencies that are suddenly vital for any candidate to possess. As a result, your requirements will also be constantly changing. Consequently, the staffing partner will have to make changes in their hiring procedure to accommodate these changes. This will require them to be flexible and adaptable. They should be able to handle any last-minute hiring requests efficiently. 

Study Their Recruitment Process

Another thing you need to do to find the right staffing partner is to study potential staffing agencies’ recruitment processes. How do they find potential candidates? Which other institutions do they reach out to? Do they use online resources or rely on physical ones?

After that, you have to see how they screen and filter the applications. Do they review and verify each application properly before forwarding it to you? Are they shortlisting the right candidates according to your hiring needs?

Similarly, you have to see how long their entire recruitment cycle takes place. When you are looking for technical talent, you may not have a lot of time to wait for the right candidate to appear. That’s why you might need a staffing agency that helps recruit candidates quickly.

Look for Specializations

A staffing partner also needs to have the right specializations. This is quite important when you are in search of technical talent with a very specific set of skills. For instance, you may need a person who is skilled at SEO.

If the staffing agency is not familiar with digital marketing concepts or they don’t have any specialization in the field of marketing, they will not be able to judge potential candidates accurately.

Therefore, you need to check if the agency has any specializations or if they work in any particular industry niche. Then, if that matches your needs, you will be in luck and benefit from better recruitment. 

Check KPIs

Ultimately, the most important thing you will have to consider is how good the staffing agency really is. And the way to check that is through key performance indicators (KPIs). Once you have shortlisted a number of potential staffing partners you could work with, you can check their KPIs to shorten the list further.

Some KPIs you can check include the time taken to hire, as discussed previously. Other than that, you should also check the cost to hire a candidate, the quality of hiring, and whether their past clients have been satisfied with their recruits. Likewise, you can check how successful their onboarding process is or the number of submittals per placement. 

Evaluate Their Candidate Sourcing Strategy

Ideally, a staffing agency should have a wide network or large pool of candidates to source potential talent from.

Therefore, you need to evaluate their candidate sourcing strategy. Good staffing agencies will have spent a lot of time and effort to maintain strong relationships with other institutions and developed a wide network through which to source candidates.

They will be able to get in touch with many active as well as passive candidates for the necessary technical role in your organization. Studying an agency’s candidate sourcing strategy can also tell you about the level of their skills and resources. 

Consider Their Experience

Experience is a very important factor, not just when you are looking for the right staffing partner but when you are looking for any kind of partner to work with. The staffing agency should have plenty of experience in not just hiring candidates but recruiting the kind of technical talent you specifically need in your organization.

If the staffing agency turns out to be the right fit for you, you might be working with them for a long time for your future recruitments as well. So, look for an agency that has a lot of experience and has proven to have a stable track record over the course of that experience as well. 

Check Company Values

You also have to check the staffing agency’s values. Their company values should align with your own organization’s values for a better and smoother partnership overall. When your values match, you can expect fewer conflicts, better communication, and even more transparency in the whole recruitment and onboarding process.

Both parties will understand each other’s needs and try their best to fulfill them. Therefore, you should try choosing an agency that aligns best with your company’s values.

Compare Costs

Finally, you will also need to consider the price of the staffing agency. Most organizations tend to outsource their hiring process to an external staffing partner because of cost constraints. So, you need to choose someone that fits your budget, or else it will defeat the whole purpose.

Make sure you understand their entire pricing philosophy. Don’t just rely on a simple rate sheet. Rather, ask them in detail about how their pricing works, which factors are considered, and how the final bill is calculated. Then, you can compare the costs between the potential agencies to find the right staffing partner for yourself. 

Why Is It So Important to Find the Right Staffing Partner?

As mentioned earlier, human resource is the most important resource for a business. That’s why you need to be that much more careful in recruiting the very best talent for your organization. This is where a staffing agency comes in.

Staffing agencies tend to have much more expertise and experience in recruiting the right candidates for various companies. Since recruitment is their entire job, they are much more efficient and effective at it. They know about all the latest recruitment strategies as well as any changes in the market, and they can adjust their plans accordingly.

They use various tools and resources as well to find the best talent for their clients. They have a much broader reach in the community where they can find active as well as passive candidates.

What all this means for an organization is that they have access to a larger and better-qualified talent pool.

Working with a staffing agency allows them to focus their time, effort, and resources on other areas of the business and where their true expertise lies. They are also saved from the hassle of the entire recruiting, onboarding, training process, and handling the payroll, benefits, etc. 

 

Experience is a very important factor, not just when you are looking for the right staffing partner but when you are looking for any kind of partner to work with. The staffing agency should have plenty of experience in not just hiring candidates but recruiting the kind of technical talent you specifically need in your organization.

How to Go About Finding the Right Staffing Partner?

So, how should you go about finding the right staffing partner for your organization’s hiring needs? Well, you already know a big chunk of what you need to do with the factors we’ve explained above. However, that step comes later on.

Before you actually start searching for a staffing agency, you need to carefully evaluate your own staffing needs. How many people do you require and for which departments? What would their job duties be? How much is your budget and so on.

All of this will not only help you decide what kind of staffing agency you require, but this information will come in handy during the recruitment process as well. Once you have evaluated your needs, you can start looking for the right staffing partner, but that’s not where it ends either.

Once you’ve found a suitable staffing agency, you need to establish a few things, such as who will be the main point of communication during the entire hiring process, the level of transparency you expect, pricing, etc. 

Final Thoughts

Needless to say, all this does sound a bit exhausting and confusing. However, taking a shortcut and hiring the first agency you come across can be quite dangerous as well.

Recruiting the wrong people will not only waste everyone’s time and resources but could potentially be harmful for your organization as well. When you work with the right staffing partner, you will be able to build a reputation as a good workplace, and that itself will help attract the kind of talent you want.

If you are experiencing a shortage of technical talent for your needs as well as a suitable staffing partner to help you with it, drop us an email at contactus@winmaxcorp.com, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. 

WinMax Blog Team

Founded in 2005, WinMax is an IT recruiting firm that specializes in connecting the best talents from the tech world to the right organization. As technology recruiters, we can help you find the right IT personnel possessing the skills, expertise, and values that reflect your organizational needs and goals.

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