Recruitment agency, freelancer or staff member: who do you really need?

You want to have more staff developers right now or “by yesterday, ” but you are not sure where to turn for help. Do you want to hire a specialist with a unique set of skills? Can you delegate the process of recruitment to a staff member? Situations vary, so let’s go have a look.

We need the whole gang

For instance, your company with over 40 staff members has recently opened 10-15 “hot” vacancies. It’s good that you already have a recruiter and HR manager, but will they be up to the task, if they normally work with just 2-4 vacancies at a time? That’s a good question.

Of course, the amount of time you want to allocate for the search depends on what you are looking for. If there are vacancies with specific requirements, it is better to delegate the search to a third party. You could use freelance recruiters who have already successfully placed similar applicants. However, only a recruitment agency can guarantee rapid results.

By the way, if you don’t have a full-time recruiter, you shouldn’t depend on your HR manager to find new employees, because they’re normally occupied with internal tasks. So don’t hesitate to delegate this task to external professionals.

There’s fire, but the stuff doesn’t put it out

If you don’t have over 100 people in your company and there usually aren’t a lot of job openings, it is very unlikely that you would need to pay for specific tools to simplify the process of recruiting and hiring. (It wouldn’t be rational to buy the whole set. ) This is why your recruiter does everything manually, keeping accounts in Excel file instead of the usual ATS. Also, it’s impossible to get all the candidates’ contact information within minutes. As such, it is not uncommon for a full-time recruiter to be unable to handle the search. You can easily save a week or two of work for your recruiter by ordering sourcing from outside. Professional sourcers at INDIGO Tech recruiters will make a list of 200+ relevant candidates for your vacancy, along with their contact information, in just a few days. Your recruiter will only have to contact them and select the interested ones. Isn’t that convenient?

Agency vs freelancers

So, you understand that you should delegate the process of hiring to external recruiters but can’t decide to whom exactly. Freelance recruiters usually work for a smaller fee than an agency, but they often promise more than they can deliver.

There are plenty of risks when working with “free birds, ” not the least of which is the language itself. You cannot be sure that your job opening for a frontend developer is not offered to a backend developer, or Vasyl is confused with Petro, or that a chat about your vacancy doesn’t become a great source of memes.

Click here to read more about a really good recruiter.

In contrast, recruitment agencies guarantee the quality of their employees and provide high standards of communication. So your reputation is protected when you stick with an agency.

The human factor is critically important when it comes to how quickly you can hire developers. Even if you engage several freelancers, one might get sick or work inefficiently due to other circumstances, but you’d never know. Using an agency ensures continuous work on your behalf, since there is at least one experienced team with knowledge and the best tools.

So maybe… all together?

It might seem like a good idea to use all these methods together to fill vacancies: assign the task to both your full-time recruiter plus freelancers, then hire an agency on top of it. Following this approach there will be more candidates and the vacancies will be filled faster. But what are the risks?

With so many people working on the same task, communication can be an issue, and any setbacks could damage your reputation. In addition, you can’t be sure that the recruiters aren’t writing to the same candidates simultaneously. This is because it isn’t easy to report to one another and coordinate actions. What kind of impression will developers get about your company if they receive a continuous flow of messages about the same job opening from different recruiters? Safe to say, they won’t be impressed.

If you do create a sort of production line, be aware that at some point you will have too many candidates. Do you have enough human resources to process them all without delay? It is usually the company itself that drags out the hiring process for months, as tech leads have no time to check test tasks and provide feedback, or the founders can’t conduct the final interview due to business trips, not to mention holidays and summer vacations. Meanwhile, the developers you wanted have accepted offers from other companies while you still haven’t hired anyone. Does this sound familiar? You can read more about other reasons preventing you from hiring the market “stars” here.

Often it is not easy to ascertain the complexity of a particular job opening and foresee the hiring process. This is why it is hard to know who to put in charge of your search for a developer. At INDIGO Tech recruiters, we always conduct an expert market analysis before starting to work on filling any vacancy.

author: Yulia Kutsai