Why the Right Recruiter Fills a Job in No Time

The cold, hard truth is that matching jobs and résumés has never worked. What’s the primary reason for this failure? Bad information — and plenty of it.

When you think about your current job and then compare it with your actual job description, you might get a good chuckle. While you do many of the things on the list of job duties, you probably do plenty that isn’t on that list. And when you look at the necessary skills, you probably won’t see some of the key characteristics that make you great at your job. For example, a software developer has to have significant programming-language experience, but if they can’t deal well with other employees, lack persistence to complete jobs thoroughly and with high quality, don’t understand modern development processes (like Agile), and can’t prioritize appropriately — they likely will not succeed.

When a job gets translated to the black and white of a text description, nuances get left behind. It may be through negligence, ignorance or simply that writing a good job description is just really hard. Invariably, key skills get left off, which makes hiring against the job specifications very difficult, if not impossible.

So who do corporate recruiters turn to when they’re in a bind and need a position filled? Third-party recruiters.

PREMIUM CONTENT: Market Trends and Best Practices in the RPO Solutions Business

Here are some reasons organizations turn to third-party recruiters to solve their most difficult hiring needs:

• Recruiters understand the industry and the job requirements. Great third-party recruiters understand the niceties of the industry vertical they work within, and they know what to look for in potential candidates. They can also help employers get the lay of the competitive landscape for talent; especially for niche positions and locations that company may have less experience recruiting for. When it comes to connecting a job to a candidate, recruiters know how to make the right match as well.

• Recruiters know the candidate pool. The right recruiter with experience in the relevant job category understands the job requirements and knows the candidate pool intimately. In some cases, they can bypass the résumé guessing game since they know available people and are well networked. They’ve spent years building their networks in order to deliver talent in a timely manner.

Because of these issues, organizations use third-party recruiters to bridge the gaps between job descriptions, résumés, and the employment market, and to ensure that they are getting candidates who are great fits for their positions.

While matching résumés and candidate profiles may have been the Holy Grail for the recruiting industry, the effective use of recruiters is a tried-and-true method of finding great talent. What do you think about matching jobs to résumés? Is it working, or does it fall flat? Our new whitepaper argues why matching employers to you, the right specialty recruiter, is the kind of matching employers should be doing.

If you’re interested in reading more, we recently wrote a whitepaper on the subject, which you can find here.

MORE: Raising standards in talent acquisition