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Originally Posted On: https://workmonger.com/4-major-benefits-of-using-a-recruitment-firm/

 

The labor market is tight across all sectors, making it especially challenging to find people to fill open positions in your education organization. In 2021, during the height of the global pandemic, employees between ages 30 and 45 resigned at the highest rates. Unfortunately, these high levels of turnover have continued in the education sector, creating added stress for teams as they work to accomplish their mission-critical work with fewer staff and on HR teams they struggle to fill roles in a challenging talent landscape.

Hiring struggles and capacity constraints only add to the stressors associated with COVID-19 for your management teams and human resources department. Using a recruitment firm is one efficient way to decrease stress and improve the capacity of your education organization during these times of high turnover. Below, we cover four benefits of working with a recruiting firm to find qualified candidates for non-teaching positions in educational organizations.

1. Expertise

Most recruitment firms specialize in a particular sector or a particular function, so they have ample experience helping leaders navigate the specific challenges with the hiring process in their area of expertise. WorkMonger is industry-specific, focusing exclusively on the education sector. We don’t rely on generic best practices. Instead, we have tailored our approach to create momentum and success for our colleagues in education.

Recruitment firms have the benefit of hiring all day, every day. While an organization may only hire for a particular type of role once every few years, this might be the 5th time that quarter that the recruitment firm has hired for a similar role. This experience allows sector-specific firms to bring numerous lessons learned to each search, allowing the searches to close faster with stronger hires. These lessons learned cut across not only the candidate sourcing process, but also the candidate selection process as well.

The benefit of expertise, however, reaches even further. Industry-specific recruitment firms, like WorkMonger, typically share insights on current trends and best practices within a particular sector. This provides information and support to staff and hiring managers, regardless of the state of the labor market. Additionally, industry-specific recruiting firms are experts at getting up to speed on each client within their sector and learning about the organization, their mission, what makes them tick, their work, and their values. This ability allows firms to not only source more effectively, but to design selection processes that truly analyze whether an individual is likely to thrive at the organization and in the role. This is especially helpful when considering candidates who come from outside the education industry. The expertise of an education recruiter allows them to spot transferable skills that you or your HR team might miss, potentially losing out on a great team member.

2. Save Time and Labor

The education sector is mission-oriented, focusing on student access and outcomes. The more time and labor that supervisors, managers, and HR need to spend on filling open positions, the less time they have to focus on the things that help students and parents. Outsourcing your candidate search and hiring helps increase your in-house teams’ productivity when it comes to the most high-value processes and tasks. Additionally, recruiting firms often fill open roles faster. Good firms have large talent pools, a vast network of connections, and systems to find people with the skills you need for a particular role. You only have to review applicants that fit your criteria, shortening your time to hire a candidate.

The global pandemic also brought the “Great Resignation.” According to Harvard Business Review, more than four million people left their jobs in July 2021, and resignation rates remained abnormally high for several months. Finding job candidates for open roles, let alone qualified candidates, has been a struggle for HR departments in every sector, including education. When you use a recruitment firm to find top talent for your non-education teaching roles, you help unburden hiring managers and team members in your HR department who are both likely struggling to keep up with the resignations that have occurred in the last couple of years. They do not have to spend time sorting through resumes, communicating with potential candidates, or conducting initial interviews. 

If you are a small education organization or do not hire that often, having a dedicated recruiter in your HR department might not be the best use of money. Partnering with a recruiting firm to handle your hiring needs can eliminate the need for in-house recruiting activities until you need them. A firm can save you time and labor by helping you institute best practices and streamline your hiring process when you decide you’re ready to take on a more active role in recruitment.

3. It’s Easier to Find In-Demand Talent

Using general job boards or setting up a job opening on LinkedIn often provides an abundance of job applicants for an open position. However, quantity does not automatically translate to quality. When you use this tactic for a job search, you have to wade through all the unqualified and inexperienced individuals who chose to apply to every opportunity they could find in a particular region or sector. That makes it incredibly challenging to identify diverse, mission-aligned, highly-specialized candidates that are in high-demand for the roles you need to fill in your education organization. Plus, many highly-skilled jobseekers do not have time to search internet job boards. Instead, they seek out recruiters who can help them find the proper role for them.

Taking advantage of the expertise that comes with an education recruiting firm like WorkMonger means you can use their knowledge and networks to both filter out candidates and proactively source candidates that match your target profile. Competent recruitment firms have processes in place and know how to help their clients whittle down their candidate pool to the top talent available for a particular job opening. They deal with candidates daily and are experts at interviewing, and know how to match candidates with employers based on needs.

A recruitment agency does not simply book interviews. You’ll likely receive fewer job candidates than if you conducted the job search in-house. However, each candidate you meet and interview will be qualified, align with your target profile, and fit your organizational needs. Hiring someone who is not passionate about the mission of your education organization or who lacks the skills necessary to excel in the role almost guarantees failure. If they do not eventually resign, you may have to let them go and start the expensive hiring process from the beginning.

4. You Can Form a Targeted Approach to Reach Your Hiring Goals

Arguably the biggest benefit of working with a recruiting firm is forming a targeted approach to reach your hiring goals. This benefit encompasses the other three major benefits to the extent that a firm’s expertise helps organizations form a targeted approach that helps them find top talent for open positions while saving them time and labor.

A targeted approach also saves money for many organizations, especially those paying fees for general job boards and agencies without getting results. At the very least, using an industry-specific recruitment firm to target your hiring goals ensures that the money you spend on recruitment produces results.

Recruitment firms can help you form a targeted approach that fulfills your hiring needs by:

Committing to Diversity

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are more important than ever in today’s workplace. Education organizations must be deeply committed to DEI so that their culture allows them to fully serve and value the students, families, and staff that make up their community. 

DEI is more than implementing programs, policies, and hiring people from different groups. Organizations need to demonstrate that they respect their team’s unique needs and perspectives to earn their trust and loyalty. This also includes ensuring their voices and contributions are valued and integrated into a work environment.

Specialized recruitment firms, like WorkMonger, understand the importance of diversity. Not only can they help organizations build diverse candidate pools to consider for their open positions, but they also have the experience and knowledge to design and execute selection processes that are both equitable and inclusive. At WorkMonger, for example, we hold a deep commitment to increasing the number of leaders of color in the education sector. In every search, our goal is that there are at least 2 leaders of color in the finalist stage for consideration. To date, 65% of our clients’ hires have been people of color. 

Providing Relevant Data

As you try to attract and hire top talent in the current labor market, you or your HR team is likely doing everything they can to fill open positions in your education organization. Organizations with high needs sometimes throw good money after bad to attract and hire candidates. While it’s tempting to ‘throw the spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks,’ it’s typically not cost-effective. You spend money with various agencies, subscriptions, and job boards. Depending on your organization, you might have travel expenses, hiring bonuses, and other costs associated with searching for and hiring suitable candidates.

A recruitment firm’s specialized knowledge also comes with massive amounts of data. They can provide you with a specific analysis of your hiring expenses and can help you eliminate search and hiring efforts that aren’t working for you and get more ‘bang for your buck.’ Specialized recruiting firms, like WorkMonger, know salary rates, available skill sets for specific roles, career expectations, current difficulties related to hiring, and recent market trends you might not know about.

Ultimately, this data-driven targeted approach saves your education organization money or frees up money that can be diverted to mission-related expenses that directly help the students and parents you serve. What’s even better? Many times a recruitment firm’s fees can be fully covered by the compensation savings associated with the role being vacant for the duration of the search. WorkMonger has specifically designed a pricing structure and tiers of support with this in mind so that paying for our services can be budget neutral. 

Finding Top Talent

Another way a recruiting firm can help you create targeted hiring goals is by helping you find the top talent for open roles. Finding top talent is a crucial part of a targeted hiring approach to help you save time and money. Recruitment firms have the expertise and networks to help weed out misaligned candidates early in the recruitment process. This ensures you do not spend money to hire and onboard team members that do not quite fit the organization’s values or that lack the skills to perform the role for which you hire them.

Additionally, recruiting firms already have a head start in the search for top talent. Many have their own industry-specific job boards. WorkMonger provides access to TrulyHired for non-teaching jobs. Additionally, good recruitment firms have a network of candidates who have approached them, providing a talent pipeline to organizations looking to fill open roles. Finally, recruiting firms also have networks that provide them an opportunity to approach highly-skilled passive jobseekers, something that takes a significant amount of time and effort when done in-house.

Contact WorkMonger Today for Your Hiring Needs

Hiring the candidates you need for your education organization can be stressful, especially in a labor market where people are leaving the workforce to stay home or make a career change. You and/or your HR team do not have to struggle to fill those roles alone. When you use a recruiting firm, you benefit from their expertise, which helps you save time and labor and create a targeted approach to hiring top talent to fill your non-teaching roles in education.

WorkMonger’s comprehensive and successful approach to hiring non-teaching roles in education hinges on four things:

• Education Talent Intelligence. We know how and where to find top talent and what they earn. We also understand their needs, providing insight for recruitment and retention.

• Organizational Alignment. We dedicate time and resources to learning about your education organization’s culture and needs. This allows us to create a customized hiring approach, including attractive job descriptions that bring diverse, talented leaders to your organization. This ensures that the candidates you hire are a strong fit.

• Algorithm-Assisted Sourcing Process. WorkMonger has a network of more than 45,000 job candidates interested in non-teaching roles in education. Our proprietary algorithm quickly and effectively matches employers with the specialized talent they need for a specific role in their education organization.

• Robust Candidate Screening. WorkMonger carefully screens each candidate for our clients with a variety of tools. We continue the vetting process once we find resumes that match the role a client must fill. Our candidate screening includes behavioral interviews, performance tasks, case studies, and targeted reference checks. WorkMonger also performs certificate verifications and background checks if applicable.

WorkMonger offers custom packages tailored to the hiring needs of your education organization. We can help find the best talent for your team and conduct interviews to reduce the candidate pool, so you can prioritize activities that directly impact your organization’s mission. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can help.