The fees charged by recruiters and head hunters varies widely and high fees of up to 25% of a successful candidate’s annual salary are not uncommon. These high costs of recruitment are prevalent for specialist roles in nice industries where there is a perceived difficulty in filling vacancies, no more so than in the digital tech sector.
Organisations with internal HR and recruitment managers have a very generalist role and will focus on recruiting for their employer for a wide range of roles. However, when the job specification gets technical or is as senior hire the organisation may employ the specialist skills of a head hunter experienced in that field. For senior technical digital tech roles the salaries will be higher and the external recruiters’ fees can start looking very expensive.
Recruitment agencies tend to charge high fees because although they work on multiple roles their placement ratio could be very low. Add into that equation the chance that an employer may place their opportunity with multiple agencies the agent feels justified in charging such high fees. They argue that this high cost is a charge for the time, expertise and effort put into the role.
For sure there are plenty of highly skilled head hunters who have been successful in recruiting the right digital talent thanks to their contacts and knowledge in that particular field. However, since the move towards comprehensive job boards and platforms like LinkedIn technology has started to play a key role in the recruitment process. Although this has made the recruitment and selection process easier for candidates and recruiters there is still huge waste. Poorly written job specifications lead to too many applicants and recruitment managers never respond because of the volumes leading to disgruntled applicants and the position often remains unfilled. There is now probably far too much reliance on these hiring tools and the number of job boards available is just mind boggling. The last thing an applicant wants to do is register on yet another job board.
Many in the digital tech recruitment industry argue that the current recruitment and selection process model is broken and almost all candidates will probably agree. There may be good news on the horizon because technology in hiring tools is changing rapidly. Recruiters need to produce more accurate job and person specifications that attract the right candidates without being swamped by irrelevant applications.
One such company who are game changing the face of tech recruitment is Hire Digital, a start-up recruitment company with a global presence that has invested heavily in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to manage the digital tech recruitment process. Their talent management software platform gives digital talent recruiters a strict criterion for posting job adverts and descriptions and their AI works in such a way that it generates a much smaller more targeted candidate list by using up to 40,000 attributes. They key to this is efficiency, recruiters spend less time generating job advertisements and trawling through hundreds of CV’s to get their shortlist, Hire Digital can rapidly access up to 1bn talent globally.
Hire Digital is AI with a human touch that is completely revolutionising the recruitment and selection process. It’s two times faster, 50 % cheaper and ten times more accurate than traditional hiring tech. To find out more speak to Robin Brohl at Hire Digital, he is a real person and would love to engage with you and help you streamline your recruitment processes.