The number of recruitment agencies increased by 56% in the last 5 years, with a record number of new agencies entering the market. So why would I, therefore, write a post on why you shouldn’t be working with a recruitment agency?

I should clarify that by a recruitment agency; I mean a contingency-based agency. There are lots of great other companies that you can work with which will deliver similar results for considerably less.

Without further ado, here are the seven reasons as to why you shouldn’t work with a recruitment agency:

1. Cost

An agency will typically charge 15-20% of first-year salary for your new employee. Is this really a sum which you are wanting to waste?

2. Value

It might take a recruitment consultant only a couple of day’s work in total to find you a candidate. Taking a salary of £30,000 and at a rate of 15% commission (i.e £4,500) meaning that you have paid someone in excess of £2,000 a day. Is that good value? It should be pointed out that this might only happen once every other week for a recruitment consultant, but from the end user perspective, it is expensive!

3. LinkedIn

Most people who work in recruitment will have a LinkedIn account. Recruitment agencies will spend their days going through LinkedIn profiles, finding and contacting candidates. Is this something that you can do yourself?

For further advice on using LinkedIn for hiring, read our article LinkedIn For Recruitment.

4. CV Databases

If a recruiter isn’t trawling through LinkedIn, they are using CV databases to find candidates. Would it be better value for you to take out your own subscription?

5. Job Advertising

Agencies will place a job ad, costing them a few hundred pounds, and then put forward the best candidates from the ad to you. If you work with a company such as Hiring People, you could place your own job advert for only £199.

6. The Agency Is Only Interested In Getting The Sale

If the recruitment agency doesn’t place a candidate, they don’t get paid. They want to do everything in their power to make sure that you pick one of the candidates they have put forward. The candidate can easily not be the best person for your business.

7. Employee Pinching

After they have just placed a candidate with you, the less scrupulous recruitment companies will try and place the same employee at a different company, meaning that you would have spent a considerable sum with nothing to show for it.

Conclusions

Recruitment agencies do have a proposition, for certain, highly specialised roles which can’t be found easily by using LinkedIn or CV databases where the recruiter’s experience of the network is required.

For junior roles, the savings which you can make by placing and reviewing CVs yourself is considerable. Even if you don’t have the time to review CVs, there are companies which allow you to outsource CV reviewing, searching for candidates using CV databases, initial telephone interviews and setting up face to face interviews with you. The great thing for you is that the cost of such a service is only £1,199 if you were to use Hiring People.