Recruiting career opportunities

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Recruiting career opportunities

- There are many career opportunities within the staffing and recruiting profession. If you're a recent grad or you're experienced in another profession, what I want to do today is go through the different segments so you understand how broad this profession is. You might be a corporate recruiter thinking about now working for a staffing and recruiting firm. Or maybe you're working for a staffing and a recruiting firm, and you just want to know the other opportunities that are available, and you want to fine tune your skill sets. If you understand the segments of the profession you'll have a better idea of the types of opportunities that hire talented people.

The first segment of the profession are your blended firms, and this basically describes the majority of staffing and recruiting firms. And what a blended firm does is they basically place people in full-time jobs, as well as temp and contract. So whether a client wants to hire somebody on a full-time basis, a temporary employee, or a high level contractor, they can go to one firm. The next segment of our profession are contract and temp firms, often referred to as staffing firms. This is a very different setup, because the actual staffing firm is the employer of record.

So everybody that they're putting out on contract or temp is maintained as their employee. So they pay the overhead, they pay the taxes, and they just bill the clients a rate every hour. So they have all the responsibility and risk, and these people are literally their employees. Then you've got your direct contingency firm, which is a little bit different because direct firms only do full-time employment. They usually have average fees anywhere from $25,000 to $30,000, but people are only paid that work for direct firms if the person actually is hired.

They get past the guarantee period, and obviously the fee is paid. The next segment is employee leasing, and what happens is this is where a company basically takes their core employees and they transfer them to the employee leasing company. And what the employee leasing company does is they handle payroll, they handle benefits, they hire all the risk administration, all the HR functions, so you can see all the different types of jobs that these leasing firms offer. In addition, they do some management consulting for the company itself.

So you can see the leasing companies really have a wide variety of opportunities available. The next segment are your managed service providers. And management service providers started out strictly managing computer systems and networks, and they have different levels of service. Sometimes they just notify the company if there's a problem. Sometimes they'd actually repair the problem. And what happened is this is sort of morphed into a different type of company, where now they're also a source for hardware, and they're handling staffing for their clients, because they're basically working on the networks, and they know where the IT talent is needed, and so there's recruiting opportunities here, because they do staffing.

The next segment that you've probably heard of is retained search. And retained search are very high level positions or hard to fill positions. Common positions that are put out on retained search would be the C-suite: CEO, CFO, CIO; and this is where they pay the firm upfront. They pay them a third upfront when they accept the retainer, and then what they do is they pay another third after so many candidates have been submitted, and then the last third is paid if they fill the retainer. Now it's interesting, they'll be paid two-thirds whether they fill the job or not.

Now there's another recruiting process segment which is called the RPO or BPO. RPO is recruitment process outsourcing, which is a form of business process outsourcing. Sounds like a lot of words doesn't it? But basically all this is they're outsourcing the entire recruitment function to an external provider. And so that external provider manages the entire recruiting process from the very beginning until they actually hire somebody, and then they also handle the onboarding.

Now, the benefits of outsourcing your recruiting function is it reduces the time to hire, it increases the quality of candidate that these companies can attract, and there's verifiable metrics that are basically handled by the RPO or BPO. Another thing they do is they reduce costs for their clients, and they improve government compliance. And lastly, you have your vendor management system, and this can refer to either the software or the process. And this is a company that works between the client and the staffing and recruiting firm.

They basically do everything. They profile the staffing and recruiting firms. They distribute and create orders. They submit candidates and basically walk through the hiring process. And once a candidate is hired, they actually handle the onboarding. They then provide time and expense tracking and reporting to their client company. Now that you've been able to see an outline of the different segments of the external staffing profession, you could target the one that best matches your talent by a simple Google search.

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/strategies-for-external-recruiters/recruiting-career-opportunities