3 Reasons You Should Partner with a Software Engineering Recruitment Agency
By
Ross Bartram

If you’ve recruited tech talent in recent years, you’ll have found competition for top candidates is fierce. It’s not an exaggeration to say there is an ongoing war for talent, particularly if you’re hiring people for software engineer jobs. Couple that with the external disruptions presented by the ‘interesting times’ we’re living in and you may find your company on the back foot trying to keep up with hiring needs.

According to a recent State of the CIO survey, the three key business drivers for IT budgets are transforming existing business processes (36%), increasing cybersecurity protections (34%) and improving customer experience (33%). Success in each of these areas is inherently linked to effective recruitment, so access to quality candidates and expert staffing advice is essential for business success.

If your organisation needs tech talent, you may be weighing up the pros and cons of using an external agency. We’ll explore how the best recruitment agencies work and how companies can benefit from expanding their recruitment capabilities with external expertise.

1. Reduce Your Cost and Time Burden

Some employers assume that recruitment agency services are too expensive and that opting for a DIY recruitment approach is more cost-effective. However, as any hiring manager who has experienced the pain of multiple open vacancies can attest to, managing recruitment yourself can be surprisingly time-consuming and expensive!

In the IT sector, the median time to hire a position is 44 days, according to LinkedIn data based on an analysis of 400,000 confirmed hires on the platform. For hiring managers, who often have little time to do their own recruiting, the business cost of that vacancy can start to accumulate over time.

Similarly, if a company has made a series of unsuccessful hires that don’t last longer than a few months, repeatedly being sent back to square one can be frustrating. In recruitment, the time and money spent on hiring can quickly add up – especially when you’re hiring sourcing in-demand roles like Full-Stack Developers, Data Engineers or Cloud Architects.

In contrast, a specialist IT recruitment agency will have dozens of skilled candidates, who are pre-vetted and pre-qualified for job interviews, all within the reach of a few phone calls. And for short-term solutions, agencies are the most efficient way to find skilled contractors and temporary workers to get projects done. Because the agency manages all payroll and HR support for contract employees, hiring short-term workers can be an excellent way to keep staffing budgets under control.

2. Access Hard-to-Find Talent

Paying for job advertising and posting on social media isn’t enough to find specialist roles like UX/UI Designers and Senior QA Engineers. Top tech professionals are less likely to apply for a role using traditional recruitment processes, particularly as most are already employed. Research by Stack Overflow shows more than 71% of developers in the UK are working full-time, and 9% are either independent contractors, freelancers, or self-employed.

In areas of acute skills shortages, the best candidates are not actively looking for a new role. Reaching these candidates, who are sometimes referred to as ‘passive’, is a speciality of experienced and well-connected recruitment agencies.

For a tech staffing agency, sourcing talent is a full-time job. Consultants work each day to scout for the best candidates at industry networking events, via referrals and other headhunting techniques. The work that goes into sourcing candidates allows agencies to build and maintain an up-to-date database of candidates they can reach out to before advertising a job.

3. Get Expert Advice

With the widely reported ‘Great Resignation’ underway, quitting your job has become almost fashionable. Workers are resigning at the highest rate since 2009 and 31% of IT professionals were actively looking for a new job between July and September 2021 – the highest rate among all industries, analysis from Gartner shows.

So where are all these people going? From their daily conversations with employers and candidates, tech recruitment specialists have a multi-dimensional perspective of the market that allows them offer expert advice to companies on hiring.

Experienced recruiters are also adept in the art of relationship-building and can use their market knowledge to understand what attracts candidates to specific roles and whether they will make a good cultural fit with an employer.

Trends relating to candidate preferences such as flexible work, job perks and career development are all factors that recruiters can advise employers on, to make their job offers more attractive.

An especially important area where an agency can help is with salary negotiations. With their daily exposure to the tech hiring market, recruiters can give companies advice on how the remuneration they’re offering for each tech role compares to other businesses in the same industry. With more knowledge of what good candidates want, hiring managers can make job offers that are more likely to be accepted – another factor that saves time!

Summary

Working with an agile, specialist recruitment agency with deep market expertise can deliver major advantages to employers who are hiring for tech roles. Whether you’re looking to recruit a team for a one-off project, expand into new verticals or add to your management team, working with an established agency will give you the edge in finding the best candidates.

Are you ready to tap into external expertise? To see what a specialist agency can do for your business, get in touch with our team to explore options for software engineering recruitment, staffing specific projects, salary advice and more.