No matter how seasoned a manager you are, you know you’re taking a chance every time you add a new person to your team. Even if you’re able to find someone you feel is a good candidate in today’s tight hiring market for skilled talent, sometimes people simply end up not working out as expected once they are on the job.
The cost of bad hires includes not only the time it will take to find a replacement but also a disruption in your operations. In turn, staff morale is dampened as everyone is stretched thin to make up for a recruitment mistake. Bad hires are more common than you might think. In a Robert Half survey, 77% of managers say they’ve made a bad hire.
A major cause of hires that don’t work out is the difficulty of predicting whether new employees will fit in with your corporate culture. Most hiring managers can only base their decision on words on a resume, a relatively short in-person or virtual interview, and perhaps reference checks or some internet sleuthing behind the scenes. For such a big decision, these safeguards are not always enough.
Measuring quality of hire can lead to better hiring decisions in the future, but it’s a lot of work. Turning to a staffing agency can save you that work plus a lot of time you’d have to spend on the rest of the recruitment process.
Staffing agencies can help you get it right the first time
Specialized staffing professionals have the connections, skills, tools and experience to help you choose the right person the first time around when you need to add staff.
Since not all jobs require a full-time employee, these specialists first assess your particular needs and help you decide if it’s better to hire a contract or permanent employee or pursue a contract-to-hire strategy.
Next, they can help you with posting job ads and evaluating resumes that come in. At the end, the firm will present only job candidates who they feel fit your needs and you should interview.
The most knowledgeable recruitment specialists have the personal and technical tools to properly measure the capabilities of candidates. They know how to identify red flags and also how to look beyond your requirements, if necessary, to find someone who may not have the years of experience you asked for but has the potential to learn quickly on the job.
Specialization: the key to avoiding bad hires
Staffing specialists focus on a specific field, such as accounting, administrative and customer service, legal, marketing and creative, and technology, and they know which skills are required for each area and how to determine which candidates have them. That means they can provide better and quicker matches than you could on your own.
They are also proactive. Using advanced AI-driven recruiting technologies, they network extensively and build lists of pre-vetted candidates in the field in which they specialize.
Many job candidates now consider fully remote or hybrid work options where they divide their time between the office and another location to be as important as a higher salary — in some cases, even more important. If the professionals you need turn out to be available on a remote basis only, staffing specialists can draw on their global networks to find out-of-market talent for you.
