10 Tips for Choosing the Right IT Recruitment Agency
Your business needs help with technology hiring and there are thousands of staffing firms from which to choose. Your CIO demands the best talent in the industry. How do you select the right firm to meet your unique business needs, and fill your positions faster with the best quality talent?
We recommend that you start by mapping out a list of requirements and what you specifically need your IT staffing firm to deliver. To make this process easier, here are 10 areas to consider when selecting an IT staffing firm:
- IT Recruiting Staff Expertise And Experience: Find out the total number of recruiters, their tenure within the staffing firm, total years of experience and specific knowledge of your industry. Your goal is to engage a staffing firm that has enough staff members with the right mix of skills and experience to meet your unique business needs.
- Source For Top Talent: An experienced, reputable IT staffing firm will draw candidates from a variety of sources including their own database, referrals, social networking websites and job boards. They will have access to candidates at all job levels from analyst, to programmer, to CIO.
- Screening and Evaluation: Engage an IT staffing firm with a robust interview, testing and screening processes. Sourcing technology professionals is very different from sourcing for other positions. You want to ensure that the recruiting staff can “tech ‘em out” and uncover a candidate’s business aptitude and soft skills.
- New Hire Retention Rates: Recruiting, hiring and training new employees, to cover technical staff turnover, can take a lot of management time and be very expensive. Engage a staffing firm with a retention rate of at least 80% after one year of employment.
- Management Team Experience: The best IT staffing firms have an experienced, stable leadership team, familiar with your industry, market and geographic location(s).
- Firm Reputation: When considering IT staffing firms, ask for and contact a list of references, and leverage sources such as Google and Twitter, to uncover online comments and reviews. Find out how many years the staffing firm has been operating and ensure that they are financially sound.
- Satisfaction Guarantee: Engage an IT staffing firm that will stand by the quality of their placements and offer a satisfaction guarantee. Understand the timing and process for technology staff replacements or refunds.
- Background Check: In addition to verifying a technology candidate’s work experience and education, your organization may require some additional security measures, credit screening or drug testing. Identify your needs, then ensure that your IT staffing firm can deliver on them.
- Service Portfolio: Do you just need help with IT staffing or are you also looking for a provider of IT services and/or technology consulting? Is your CIO or CTO asking for help with the overall development of an IT strategy or a high profile point person, to lead a PMO? Instead of working with multiple vendors, it may be helpful to find one firm that can service multiple IT business needs.
- Costs: When comparing IT staffing fees, consider both a short term and long term view, and both hard and soft costs. Factor in the expected time to fill your position(s), the quality of the candidates, the training that may be required and the costs to handle expected turnover.
Bonus Tip 11! In addition to traditional, technology staffing vendor criteria, you may also want to consider a firm’s “green business” strategy and the firm’s involvement in the community and with charitable organizations.
