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Good recruiters are worth their weight in gold. Find a good one, and keep them!
Hiring has many facets, which takes a full-time job to manage. Most businesses, especially small and those in rural settings, need more financial capacity to hire someone dedicated to recruiting.
From my experience in HR, I spent about 20%-25% of my job recruiting. Due to the other job demands, I could not spend any more time. I have advocated ever since that recruitment needs to be a very active task. Businesses can’t just rely on the luck that someone will apply or maybe someone knows someone else and you get a good referral. This is reality, and everyone functions out of necessity.
As I have become older (and wiser), I have realized that hiring skilled people in their area is worth the investment!
Example: I have decided to utilize a financial advisor as it is not my bailiwick, and this professional is much more skilled and educated than I am in this realm. Ultimately, I will have a better financial portfolio than trying to manage something I know 10% about. Give it to the expert.
Is A Recruiter Worth It? What's In It For Me?
Financial Impact
Let's talk about the financial impact of using a recruiter. Many businesses shy away from using a recruiter because of the money aspect. Industry standards are around 18% to 30% of the candidate's first-year salary. However, let's put numbers to that to help make your business decision.
At a high level, consider this common business scenario:
Small businesses need an additional consultant because they turn away new business daily. The average charge rate for a consultant is $200/hour, and each consultant averages 4 billable hours per day. Each day this business is without an additional consultant, they lose approximately $800/day. This business posted their job 6 months ago on some websites and hoped for the best as they have no time to manage recruitment efforts. Using 26 weeks, 5 days a week as our measure of how long they have needed an additional consultant, this business has lost $104,000 in potential revenue in 6 months!
A good recruiter will have interviews lined up in the first couple of weeks and close a deal soon after if the consultant's annual salary is $75,000. Based on the 20% industry standard, the business would pay the recruiter $15,000. The $800 per day of lost profit would take about 19 days to recoup the recruiter fee. You most likely will have a candidate placed within a fraction of the time than you would if you did this on your own. Again, this is a very high-level analysis, but that is a good return on investment in my book and most everyone's book!
• NETWORK: Recruiters are in their field because they should be good at networking. If not, there are much bigger problems! And having an extensive network means a large, robust pool of resources at their fingertips.
• OUTSIDE PERSPECTIVE: A great advantage of using a recruiter is getting the outside perspective. A good recruiter will offer creative solutions to fill the position, discuss current trends, and challenge the status quo job posting.
• BUILD RELATIONSHIPS: Recruiters should be in it to build relationships with the candidates and businesses for the best outcome.
• GIFT TO “SELL” YOUR COMPANY: Good recruiters have an excellent knack for connecting with candidates and effortlessly educating and inspiring them to love your business. They have a gift. Let them do it.
• CAN BE A GUIDE AND/OR COACH: Skilled recruiters will help both the candidate and the business with the steps in the recruiting process. This can be helping with interview questions, prepping for the interview, helping with an onsite interview, recruiting tips & tricks, helping guide an offer letter, etc. Use them as a resource!
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Good recruiters are worth their weight in gold. Find a good one, and keep them!
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- Torie Poser and GoRural Staff
Additional Benefits Of Hiring A Recruiter
Should I Live in a Rural Area?
Well, that is a loaded question! Only you can answer this question. However, it is worth a nudge to experience what rural offers. Let’s start here, however... Rustic is in the eye of the beholder. What I would consider rural, known more as a town than a city, some may consider frontier and isolated. And for some, what they think rural could be a city with 150,000 people which I would call significant! Regardless of what lens you are looking through, the responses are pretty similar when I asked those what rural life has offered them.
Rural living isn't for everyone, and that is ok! I know a few people that open areas give them panic attacks...like bonified ones! I have heard them say, "if something happened while driving down the road with no services for 70 miles, who will rescue me? I may die out here as there are no services." I love these people and love that they cannot live in a rural area...again, that is ok! I cannot live in a metropolis, so to each their own! Hoping these tidbits help you with what you can expect living in a rural area.