Boost hiring: 5 ways telecom agency enhances strategy

Recruiting telecoms professionals into high demand, low candidate availability market, sucks up time, energy, and sometimes diverts focus from core business tasks. Whilst some organizations recruit using a dedicated internal recruitment team, others may leave the responsibility to Human Resources (HR) and while both teams can achieve success when recruiting, the expertise of a specialist telecoms recruitment agency can add benefits above that of hiring the right person.

Internal recruitment/HR teams often have multiple areas to cover, and indeed other roles to play within the business other than simply recruiting, often covering various business areas or specialisms.

Using an experienced, specialist telecoms recruitment agency, such as First Point Group, will not only find you the right hire, but can also assist with advice on hiring strategies, the identification of hidden talent pools, negotiate on the organization’s behalf to ensure the right market rates are being paid, and add value and knowledge to the client organization.

Here are our five top reasons for hiring a telecoms recruitment agency:

1) Access to industry insight

Recruitment agencies are in a unique position in that they have a holistic understanding of the market. They’ll know the type of active and passive candidates on the market, expected salaries, packages and benefits and may even know the type of roles that competing companies are recruiting for. A good recruitment agency can find the right candidates in addition to assisting an organization with hiring strategies in order to attract more of these candidates in the future. Yes, there is a placement fee, but that can be negated by ensuring that a client is not overpaying and indeed is not wasting energy, resources and indeed valuable time searching several months for white elephants.

Indeed, often a hybrid approach of working with a recruitment agency at the same time as an internal team search, helps an organization formulate the best person to fill the position quicker and more cost-effectively. If you can find them yourselves, then great. If not, the agency is already there with a short list.

2) A complete focus on the client’s recruiting needs

Agencies fees are success based. A good recruitment agency will take their time to understand their client’s exact needs, they will probe into personality types, deep dive into technical specifications and must have experience and knowledge.  Our recruiters are often ex-engineers or project managers, they use their hands-on experience to gain a full understanding of the exact fits the client needs. Whilst an internal recruitment or HR team will have a job description, they may be working on multiple projects simultaneously, potentially causing their focus to be pulled in many directions, and most probably won’t have a technical background to aid them with their screening. A specialist telecoms recruitment agency is set up to do the deep dive, to use its inside knowledge and connection to find those exact matches, as ultimately if it doesn’t, it won’t get its fee.

3) Identification of relevant candidates

Some HR or internal recruitment teams may recruit for a variety of specialisms including marketing, commercial and finance in addition to technology jobs and telecommunications jobs. They’ll generally have a good understanding of multiple professions and technologies, but a specialist telecoms recruitment agency will have an existing candidate pool ready to go; one that its fully focused expert recruiters have been using their technical backgrounds to build. Internal recruitment and HR teams can sometimes be starting a search from scratch, thus potentially missing out on hidden passive candidates, whereas a recruitment agency already has an engaged audience it has been cultivating for years, building these profiles for the exact purpose of having them ready to go when a client calls.

4) Quick Hiring

Speed matters. Saving time is a huge reason for using a telecoms recruitment agency. In a candidate driven market, it’s ‘first past the post’ to get the very best talent. There are no prizes for just missing out on that perfect candidate. By the very nature of recruitment agencies interacting with hundreds of candidates daily, building communities of specialist and knowing what their next career moves would like to be, using a specialist agency gives you a jump on the competition. Again, there is a fee, but indeed what is the cost of not filling a key role for several months to the business, or indeed missing out on the best candidates as they have moved to the competition. By having a complete focus on the clients hiring needs, a recruitment agency will be able to meet their clients demands in a timely manner and avoid any unnecessary delays.

5) Access to the wider talent pool of contractors

When recruiting for a telecommunications job, some organizations may not have considered the possibility of hiring a contractor rather than a permanent hire. Depending on the nature of the job i.e. a new role or a replacement one, consideration should be given to whether hiring a contractor would be a more effective option. There is a plethora of reasons to hire a contractor including: cost savings (no holiday or sick pay), reduced overhead costs, the flexibility to hire and fire at short notice; essentially it’s a try-before-you-buy approach. Also, if you hire a career contractor, your organization will benefit from someone who may have worked in a multitude of companies and technologies before and therefore be able to quickly add value, upskilling your team via knowledge transfer.

If your organization is hiring and would consider partnering with a specialist telecommunications agency, we’d love to hear from you, so please get in touch for an initial call.