Human Assets are the Greatest Assets – Recruit
with Care
By David Lewis
Reprinted from the Norwalk Hour
2/23/04
Any successful business has experienced the
upward cycle time and time again, whereby the business grows. The
volume being handled by members of your team starts to become overwhelming,
sometimes gradually and sometimes in a spurt, until that imaginary
line in the sand is crossed. The next step in order to stem the
tide: increase your employee headcount. Many of us look at this
moment as a necessary evil of success. Why? Usually it's because
we know the difficult road that lies ahead in the pursuit of a
qualified new member of your team. There are the ads to write,
finding the right newspaper, website, or association to post the
need, tremendous number of emails and phone calls from candidates
and employment agencies, the countless resumes to review, and on
and on. Oh…and there is the time
all of this will rob from your workday that when we determined every
minute is needed to keep pace with the workload. There is however
a viable alternative out there to this unattractive necessity of
business success. Outsource it.
Recruitment Outsourcing is the utilization of a third party for
the purpose of managing the entire recruiting process. Service providers
do all of the legwork, writing the ads, selecting the venues for
ad placement, screening the resumes, scheduling the interviews, and
even checking the references and making the offer. Unlike using an
employment agency this service is delivered based on an hourly rate
for time consumed in the process, whereas an employment agency charges
you a percentage of the annual compensation of anyone you hire. Hire
one person through Recruitment Management and you can see savings
of 50% or more off what you would have paid an agency for a candidate
of the same caliber. Hire two or more people and the cost per hire
drops exponentially.
There are a multitude of other advantages
to utilizing such outside expertise. To start this is their core
competency. They know how to write a good ad. They know the best
places to post the ad. They understand how to “weed out” resumes efficiently, “to
find the needle in the haystack”, how to properly screen candidates
on the phone. There's also a streamlined process that is both perfected
from use and intuitive in nature, not to mention highly effective.
What's best of all: they handle all the work that would otherwise
zap your team's productivity.
The cost justification for using this service
can be evaluated from another key perspective. Most businesses
lack an internal expert who has even a modest level of recruitment
process expertise. Therefore, most of the time someone not highly
skilled in the screening and selection of candidates for employment
is being asked to champion the effort. How many of us would deliver
our key product or service utilizing under-skilled labor? Few if
any. So why do we place a relative novice in the role of finding
new human resources? Most growing organizations cannot afford to
recruit new talent in an incomplete fashion or with a half-hearted
effort and still live up to the standards that facilitated their
initial success and subsequent growth. The cost therefore of recruiting
new human assets into your organization who haven't been properly
sourced, properly screened and/or properly qualified is far greater
than the investment in doing this right the first time. Further,
the delivery of the right resource to your team fosters greater
success and creates a more fertile environment for future growth.
Bottom line – your human assets are your greatest assets.
Business expansion is a great thing. It shouldn't be something dreaded,
at least in part, due to the task at hand of securing new human resources.
It doesn't have to be nearly as difficult a process. Finding a solid
partner to whom you can outsource the effort can return you to the
job at hand, while concurrently driving the process of growing your
business forward.
