Alternative Recruitment Methods

When it comes to building up your team, there are many ways you can go about it. The best option for your company may depend on a few different factors. But in general, we believe that flat fee recruitment is the way to go. Though this is just our opinion. To make sure you are fully informed, allow us to take you through the different alternative recruitment methods before we advocate for flat fee recruitment.

Contingency based

Contingency based recruitment is one of the more popular options for a recruiting agency to offer. This is because of one very simple reason. If a project happens to take longer than expected, they are most likely still landing in a profit margin. Contingency based recruitment means that the agency is paid a percentage of the first-year salary of the position upon successful hire. For example, if the agency sets this percentage at 10%, and the position they hire for you has an annual salary of $80,000, you are paying them $8,000. This may be for two months to two years of work. Depending on how long it takes the position to close.

Hourly

Some agencies will offer to do the recruitment on an hourly basis. While this is fair, you may still have it where a position takes a lot longer to fill. Bringing the cost higher than you may have wanted it to be. Since they will be working closely with you and perhaps even your team, make sure they are aligning their search with your company’s values. This can be difficult to do. So take the time to get to know their workers and see if they are right for you! Learn more about this in our previous blog: How to Find the Right Recruitment Agency.

Do it yourself

There are alternatives to recruitment services for those who love to roll up their sleeves and do it themselves. We think that this is a great work ethic. There are definitely pros to going through the candidate list on your own, getting that first-hand feel for who you are going to interview, and being the first point of contact for whoever is applying. The downfalls, though, are that you may not have the time to handle it. There is a surprising amount of work that goes into DIY hiring. Juggling candidates can be a monumental task if you are not used to it, or if your week suddenly gets busy. Also, if people fall through the cracks, it’s tough to rebuild that relationship.

A great tool to help you through the confusion is one we use at Entreflow called Breezy. It has clean pipeline layouts to clearly show you which candidates are in which stage of the screening process. This will help reduce the amount of people lost in the sea of resumes.

It can be very exciting to hire new employees. They can bring knowledge, experience, and a fresh perspective to your team. Though, there is an alternative to hiring new employees, as that can be quite costly, especially if they don’t work out.

If you’re looking to expand your current team, or replace a member that isn’t performing as well as you’d like, first consider the options for retraining. Retraining can end up being a much more cost-effective way to improve your team. By having members gain new knowledge, they can renew their worth to the company, and maybe even revamp their excitement for their role! Encourage them to delve into new training courses, or to have them dig deeper on a subject they struggle with and create a presentation to share with the team. This allows them to take their learning into their own hands and it feels less like a punishment. 

At Entreflow, we do weekly “TEDTalks” where a team member chooses a business-related topic and shares a presentation with the team. We all get to learn something new, and that person owns that sense of accomplishment.

How does Flat Fee Recruitment work you ask? Well, what happens is that a company will charge a flat fee for any position being hired in your organization. Whether you are looking for a labourer or a management member the pricing can be the same. Most companies will have a guestimated turnaround time for their recruitment efforts and as long as there are no significant changes to the position during that time, they are meant to deliver a candidate at the end of that period. Where this gets complicated is for some more complicated positions with a known longer recruitment period (i.e. CEO’s, CFO’s etc.), the average recruitment timeline of 6 – 8 weeks may be longer, so some recruitment agencies will do either an increase flat-fee amount or a monthly engagement might be more worthwhile, both options still cheaper than a Contingency based fee. If this hasn’t brought you to our side of preference, here are our top 5 reasons why we love flat-fee recruitment:

1. Motivation for the recruitment team to work quicker (vs. hourly).

The quicker they can find you a great candidate, the faster they can free up their time for new clients.

2. Incentive to find the right hire and send better candidates in (vs.  the contingency volume game).

Since the goal is to find the perfect person in an efficient manner, the recruiter will be diligent in isolating the great candidates versus the mediocre ones that contingency based recruiters may send you to just finish up the project.

3. It’s cheaper than contingency.

We mentioned the percentage of salary earlier, that can be a huge expense for your company, especially if you are on the smaller side. 

4. You can budget/plan for the expense.

Speaking of cost efficiency, since it’s just the one fee, you don’t have to worry about finding room in your budget if the position is taking a while to fill. No surprise costs!

5. Feels more like working with an extension of your team.

You get to pass on the burden of stress in finding a candidate to someone who loves to find the perfect person for a role. This person, if done right, should feel like an extra team member. They should learn about the company and the team to help find who will be the best fit.

Hopefully we have covered all of the alternative recruitment strategies well enough for you to make an informed decision. While all of these options are viable, popular, and will work for your benefit of finding a candidate, we can’t help but love flat fee recruitment. If you need any help, or even just some consultation on finding a great candidate, please feel free to explore our flat-fee recruitment services and reach out to our team.