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A Publication of WTVP

People are the most important factor in the success of any business. Finding the best candidates for your open positions is not always easy, but it’s always worth it. Engaging a third-party recruiter may be just what your business needs to get the best person for the job.

Business owners and leaders are often hesitant to hire recruiters. And it is an investment—one that is sometimes reserved only for filling top C-level positions. However, recruiters work across all industries to find talent at any career level.

In fact, recruiters continue to have an important job to do even in tight economies and times of high unemployment. With demographic shifts, the population of professional, college-educated and specialty-trained workers is still too small to meet current demand. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate in the U.S. for “management, professional and related” workers was 2.9 percent in August 2015—an extremely low rate considering most economists agree that even a healthy economy usually has at least a five-percent rate of unemployment across all categories of workers.

Recruiters are professionals who are dedicated to finding and attracting new employees to your organization for a specific position. Here are four good reasons why your business may need to engage one:

  1. You can’t find them on your own. This is the top reason I am in business: a client’s usual methods of finding and attracting talent have not worked, and they need my help. Recruiters are used to urgent and important searches, and we can fill those critical roles.
  2. You don’t have your own internal recruiting function. In August 2015, according to ADP/Moody’s National Employment Report, 79 percent of all new job growth came from small and midsized companies. It is quite possible that many companies hiring right now are not large enough to have their own human resource manager, let alone a dedicated recruiting department. They may also not have enough year-round demand in hiring to warrant their own resource—a great reason to hire an outside recruiter to do searches for you, only when you need them.
  3. Your own HR department cannot handle the volume of hiring on its own. Smaller companies may only have one human resource person, or a small team with many other responsibilities. When hiring gets hectic or difficult, you may not have the internal bandwidth to handle some high-priority or high-volume positions. This is a great time to use the help of a professional recruiter.
  4. You have a high-profile or confidential search. Recruiters are often brought in when there is a vacancy at the top of the organizational chart, whether it makes the papers or is handled confidentially. Perhaps you do not want your customers or employees to know you are seeking a new vice president. Or perhaps you cannot let your team know that you are hiring a new finance director so you can promote the incumbent. There are a number of reasons to handle a search discreetly, and when you do, a recruiter can fill an important role quickly and quietly.

In your own business, you may find that the do-it-yourself model of hiring simply is not working for one or more of your key positions. Investing in the services of a professional recruiter can bring a great return: talented, hardworking, top-notch employees. iBi

Leah Olsen is owner of Stonewell Recruiting, an executive and technical search firm in Peoria. She can be reached at (309) 657-0491 or [email protected].

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