What Is Contract Recruiting and How Can It Help Business Owners Optimize Their Hiring Process?

Whether running a startup or managing a large corporation, recruitment is always tricky and complicated. From the outside, it appears to be as simple as posting job openings, reviewing applications, interviewing candidates, and choosing the best ones.

In reality, it is seldom streamlined and smooth, but you can certainly try to optimize the process. One mistake most organizations make is that they don’t value the recruitment process and its importance in the company’s success.

If your company is struggling with its hiring process, there is a sound strategy that optimizes the recruitment of talented professionals: contract recruiting. It is a promising method that helps companies get the best results from their recruitment campaigns.

What Is Contract Recruiting?

Contract recruiting refers to filling up positions in a company while being in a part-time capacity or short-term basis. You aren’t a full-time employee, but you are brought on to solve a hiring problem and devise effective recruiting solutions.

Contract recruiting also involves a contract or recruitment agreement between the recruiter and the client. For the entire contract length, the recruiter will work solely for the client. They are responsible for gathering candidates, screening them, and communicating with them on behalf of the organization. Depending on the contract terms, once you have fulfilled all the requirements, the contract will also be over.

For instance, if a company has hired you to find employees for five positions on a short-term basis, you will only finish your work once you have found five suitable applicants for them. As the contract recruiter, you receive a recruitment fee upfront from the client.

In most cases, a small percentage of the fee is paid as a retainer at the contract’s start. In contrast, another small portion is paid during the recruitment process, preferably after at least one candidate has been selected and hired. The exact payment details, schedule, and frequency are embedded into the terms and conditions of the contract that are agreed upon between both parties.

There are several reasons why any company would hire a contract recruiter instead of an in-house recruiter. Most organizations hire them when they have an upcoming project for which they need employees, but they don’t have the budget to hire full-time recruitment professionals. Even though they have the budget, some companies hire contract recruiters for quick hiring campaigns because there won’t be any work for the recruiters once the positions are filled.

Another reason why a company might opt for contract recruiting is that they suddenly need many employees or want to expand their workforce but don’t want to work with an in-house recruiter. Moreover, a company might adopt this method if it has some unique or rare positions for which finding suitable candidates can be quite a challenge. Some positions are more challenging to fill up than others, and a contract recruiter can help companies find the right talent for them as well.

You might also see contract recruiters being called contingency recruiters or headhunters, and they either have hourly wages or a fixed-income project with their client. They work as a recruiting consultant with a particular company, helping it fill its hiring requirements. Contingency recruiters generally have contracts that last anywhere between three to six months. Once their work is finished, they are free to search for their next client contracts. Since you can expect the recruiter to fill various positions quickly, they have a strong network and a pool of qualified and talented candidates for different fields and industries.

How Can Contract Recruiting Help Optimize the Hiring Process at Your Company?

Contact recruiting refers to hiring a recruitment professional on a contractual basis for filling up one or multiple positions in your organization. It is a suitable alternative to having a full-time recruiter or in-house recruitment team, which only springs into action when a vacancy or a new position is created. Several companies have started adopting this method for finding suitable candidates, and they have experienced several benefits due to this.

1. Contract Recruiters Are Highly Skilled

First and foremost, contract recruiters are highly skilled and experienced recruitment professionals. By hiring them on a contract, organizations gain access to their expertise and efficient methods and capabilities, which have been polished by their numerous years of experience in the recruitment field.

Therefore, you can empower your hiring team by bringing a contract recruiter on board, and they would help you fulfill your hiring needs at a much faster pace than your in-house hiring professionals can. If you enlist their services during peak hiring season or in times of increased demand, you won’t have to worry about getting thousands of irrelevant applications that would do you no good.

2. Contract Recruiters Work Faster

As mentioned in the previous section, contract recruiters can conduct the hiring process much faster than your staff recruiters would be able to do, mainly because this is what they have been doing for many years without a pause.

On the other hand, in-house recruiters aren’t as efficient or dedicated to finding the right talent for your organization. When there are no vacancies or need for hiring, they might not bother growing their network or sourcing talented professionals they can contact if a vacancy comes up.

Since they have contractual obligations, you can expect contract recruiters to do their work swiftly, and they are better prepared even before they step into your office.

3. Contract Recruiters Have Only One Job

Whether you consider a startup or a group of companies, you would find that nearly all of the managers and leaders are overworked and multitasking, which means that they don’t have the time to properly screen, interview, and select applicants for any new positions or vacancies that may come up.

As a result, the recruitment drive doesn’t achieve its intended purpose, or you end up with incompetent hires who don’t know what they are doing. Therefore, it is always best to supplement your hiring campaign with a contract recruiter because they are dedicated and focused only on getting the right people to fill up positions in your company. As a result, you will be able to boost efficiency and also fulfill your hiring requirements much faster.

Plus, your managers and other employees will be able to direct their focus on other vital operations.

4. Contract Recruiters Know How to Navigate through Talent Shortages in the Market

The talent shortage is not a problem when you have a contract recruiter in your organization. Their life’s mission is to dig deeper and uncover the best talent, no matter where they may be located.

Regardless of the position or the difficulty faced in filling it, you can rely on a contract recruiter to find you the right talent for every position that you have hired them to serve. There is no doubt that the job market is incredibly competitive, so you need someone who has extensive knowledge and experience regarding recruitment and can also help you filter out the best candidates to interview and select.

You don’t have to worry about getting names that no other company has even considered.

5. Contract Recruiters Add Value to the Hiring Process

When you hire a contract recruiter to fill up the vacant positions in your company, you can expect them to go above and beyond in their pursuit of the best talent that suits your requirements.

You can also expect them to do more than they are expected to. For instance, if you have already screened a few candidates for a highly reputable position, but most of them won’t come to the phone, you can count on the contract recruiter to approach the problem from another angle and try to rope in as many exceptional candidates as possible so that you have the opportunity of choosing the best ones out of them.

6. Contract Recruiters Understand All Industries and Fields

Another reason why contract recruiters can optimize the hiring process because they aren’t only experienced or resourceful. Still, they are also well-versed with the hiring requirements and protocols in various fields and industries. This means that they can work with a wide range of companies, and they might have already worked with a client that belongs to the same industry as yours.

You can quickly expect that contract recruiters know their way around the industry most of the time, including understanding the different positions and their key specifications and devising robust strategies to approach candidates.

Expert recruiters know that there is no standard approach or strategy that works for every industry, so they have to tailor their approach depending on the industry and position they are recruiting for.

7. Contract Recruiters Help in Reducing Organizational Risk

As you already know, contract recruiters are only hired for a short period to oversee the hiring needs at an organization, and once their contract is complete, they can look for future clients. This way, organizations don’t have to worry about sticking with an employee they have no use for, especially when the hiring demand is low or the hiring campaign is complete.

Therefore, there is no long-term binding commitment usually involved with in-house recruiters. Moreover, there is a lower organizational risk, and your administration department has to deal with one less employee.

8. Contract Recruiters Help in Reducing Hiring Costs

Contract recruiters know everything about the job market, including hiring trends, average salaries, etc. As compared to in-house recruiters, they are more involved in the job market, making it easier for them to understand the different types of hiring requirements and principles for various industries. Therefore, you can expect them to get the best candidates for multiple positions at the best salaries.

For instance, if the average salary for a senior software developer is $100,000 per year in your state, you can expect the contract recruiter to work around it rather than offering them $120,000 right off the bat. As a result, contract recruiting helps you lower your hiring costs and prevent you from spending excess money to get the most talented candidates.

9. Contract Recruiters Also Help You Build a Pool

Several companies have full-fledged hiring and human resources departments responsible for researching everything about the job market and sourcing talented candidates from time to time.

Even if your organization has a hiring team, the chances are that they don’t have a pool of updated resumes from talented professionals who would be an asset to the company. Moreover, these teams usually spring into action whenever there is a new position or vacancy, and they are quite relaxed when there is a reduced demand for hiring.

If you are looking to have a network or pool of qualified and talented professionals, you can rely on the contract recruiter to develop this for you even when there is no vacancy. They already have an up-to-date list of candidates for various positions and industries, and you can ask them to send some contacts in your direction, provided that you add this into the contract terms.

10. Contract Recruiters Help with Compliance Requirements

Last but not least, contract recruiters are also well-versed with the hiring requirements, policies, laws, and regulations for each state and different industries. Therefore, they can help your in-house recruitment or HR team comply with those laws so that there are no discrepancies or legal loopholes that might become a problem for the company later on.

Contract recruiters are highly experienced and talented professionals that can help you fill various positions in your company, and you don’t have to worry about sticking with them full-time. If you can find a contract recruiter that understands your organization and hiring requirements, you won’t have any trouble making your hiring process efficient.

To know more about how professionals on a contract basis and recruitment process outsourcing can help you reduce the time-to-hire and cost-per-hire at your company, recruit for challenging to fill positions, and grow your team quickly with high-impact hires, get in touch with us at Recruiter.com. 

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