Page Outsourcing: What you need to know to beat those hiring blues

If you are an HR head or hiring manager, when your internal resources are stretched, hiring several new positions or replacement candidates at once can feel like a challenge and a chore. In the worst case, your short-term hiring challenge can quickly grow to feel bigger than your regular day-job: as moving parts involved increase in both volume and momentum.

The secret? Seek out the short-term help that can transform such a situation into an opportunity. In such a situation, short-term help is at hand. Very often, the best choice is to take your roles out to a recruitment agency, but if you don't have established relationships with vendors, where should you start? Here are some key signs that you need Page Outsourcing.

You have a lean hiring team

One advantage of selecting one recruitment partner is that your address book quickly becomes smaller and the anxiety over choosing multiple agencies and contacts, quickly vanishes. Any recruiter that you use, regardless of how often you use them, should know you and your business inside out, and can provide total transparency in their capability to help.

Your business is spread across multiple locations

Consolidating your business when it's in more than one country can prove tricky, especially when it comes to hiring. A regional hub in Singapore is very common for companies, so hiring locally in other locations could see scratching your head over which recruitment partners to use. By centralising your point of contact, you only need to pick up the phone once – and any new roles will get disseminated to the correct local teams.

The company has a complex internal matrix

Just as complicated as multiple locations is an internal matrix or business structure that at first seems near-incomprehensible for those hiring talent. If you find the need to communicate the correct information accurately and concisely, becomes a repetitive task, seek help. Choose a select recruitment partner to work with, and give your key account manager all the necessary information ­– just once. It is then their job to communicate and socialise this internally, and ensuring that you don't face the same questions again and again.

You have a hiring need or struggle to hire in certain areas

Most companies that are seeking to fill either niche or challenging positions, reach out to recruitment agencies at some point. If the roles are in a growing function of your business, this appetite to hire may not slow. Equally, those vacancies attracting a high level of attrition will require consistent attention. It therefore becomes crucial to work with a recruitment partner who knows your challenges internally and externally, and knows the market intimately. That supplier will know how to best 'pitch' you to the market, and where to source the best candidates for you. Critically, they may even help to track future prospects for you, to keep you ahead of the play.

Your stakeholders misunderstand the talent landscape

Sometimes working with confused or stubborn stakeholders, can be as frustrating as ill-informed recruiters. If you work regularly with an account manager, the good ones will provide weekly or monthly activity reporting, alongside qualitative market statistics. This additional layer of information can help you to 'manage upwards', reassuring or educating your stakeholders on the need for flexibility around hiring requirements, and on the length and depth of the processes involved.

Do these situations sound painfully familiar? Regardless of where you hire once a year or once a week, working with recruitment partners that value you and your business is ultimately crucial. As such, suggesting an account management team to run your recruitment is a good way to engage them further – and to provide you the peace of mind that your talent acquisition is in the best hands.

If you'd like to discuss the above, or seek help in your complex hiring, click here.