Your recruitment process requires careful consideration of the staff you hire, train, retain, and grow to benefit your business. When hiring candidates, you need to be sure you hire people qualified for the work in your company, people who will be great at teamwork and add value to your company’s growth. But, how do you find great employees who will stay and grow with your business? One way to find, grow, and retain great employees is with a recruitment specialist. We look at how specialist staffing services can help you make good hiring decisions.
What Is a Staffing Specialist?
When you are thinking of hiring a recruiter, you might wonder, “What is a staffing specialist?” Staffing specialists, also called recruitment specialists, manage your company’s recruitment. These people work with your human resources department to determine your company’s staffing needs, such as what roles your business requires and employee qualifications.
Staffing specialists often work through a staffing agency outside your human resources department. To qualify for the role, a person usually has a bachelor’s degree in human resource management. At least one year of staffing or recruitment specialist experience is necessary. To work with businesses, employee candidates, and HR departments, staffing specialists need a solid knowledge of human resources skills and hiring practices, such as current recruitment procedures.
An effective recruitment specialist should demonstrate several key skills for your recruitment needs. The hard skills you would need for this position are with recruiting software. Because staffing specialists work with your human resources department, with both employees and employers, you must also know labor laws and employment regulations.
When you hire a staffing specialist, their soft skills are as essential as their hard skills. Soft skills involve working with team members, building interpersonal relationships, and communicating. Communication skills are essential for staffing specialists because they interview and evaluate candidates using tools such as structured interviews and tests. Staffing specialists also often need organizational and time management skills to work with your team members’ hiring needs and schedules.
What Does a Staffing Specialist Do?
When you hire a recruiter, you may ask, “What is a staffing specialist, and what does a staffing specialist do?” It’s important to understand how contract staffing works before deciding if it’s right for your employment needs. A recruiter’s job is to find and build relationships with consultants in their core discipline. A staffing professional will understand the technical specifications of each candidate, the work they do, and what they want to work on to advance their careers. Staffing specialists fill many roles for your business. They work as advocates for your business and advertisers for your job roles, and they organize your applicant tracking system. Their responsibilities include advertising roles, coordinating outreach, and meeting with potential employee candidates. The roles of a staffing specialist are understanding hiring needs, advertising job openings, outreach to candidates, pre-employment screening, and managing candidate information.
What Services Do Staffing Specialists Provide?
Recruiters provide expert knowledge in their technical discipline, including a deep understanding of the market. They present opportunities, working the process from start to finish. The initial intake is where the employer contacts the staffing agency, requesting someone specialized in a specific industry. A recruitment specialist is usually well-versed in several technical and industry job specifications. The next step for your hiring process with a staffing specialist is to convey details such as the candidate’s job responsibilities, the number of employees you need, when you need employees, and the employee’s hourly wage or salary. Other issues a staffing specialist addresses are:
1. Hiring Needs
Before searching for potential employees, you should consider your current and future hiring needs. Staffing specialists work with their clients to identify hiring needs and help them develop job descriptions. They look at what technical skills you require, the level of expertise your business needs, and how many employees your business requires to fill gaps in hiring. They help design procedures and metrics, such as assessments and interview questions.
2. Reaching Candidates
After writing the job description, a staffing specialist will reach out to candidates through various channels. A recruitment specialist helps your business advertise job openings across different venues, such as career pages, job boards, and social media platforms. They use online tools, such as CareerBuilder, Ideal, and Bamboo HR applicant tracking systems and resume database technologies. With postings on websites like LinkedIn or job boards such as Indeed.com and specialty technical job boards, staffing specialists reach out to local and global talent to find the right candidates for your business.
3. Your Business Representative
The work of staffing specialists is not solely online. To be effective for your business recruiting, staffing specialists represent you to the community. They attend job fairs, liaise with college alumni associations, and organize in-house recruiting events. As an example for your business, they benefit you by being the face of your business, representing you and your company values to hiring candidates, such as advertising, recruitment fairs, and reaching out to former contractors who have worked with the agency before.
4. Pre-employment Screening
Staffing specialists are involved in several aspects of the hiring process. One aspect of hiring is pre-employment screening, such as getting references and performing background checks. A pre-employment screening verifies a candidate’s information to ensure the candidates are factual about their qualifications and job conduct. Some examples of pre-employment screening are Social Security number (SSN) authentication, criminal history background checks, drug and alcohol screening, and public records searches to surface details like driving records. They also check if employee candidates have the specific qualifications for the position. They choose the most qualified candidates for the position, passing this information on to the employer before scheduling interviews.
5. Management
At the end of the hiring process, staffing specialists are valuable for their organizational skills. The role requires organization skills to manage candidates’ information, such as resumes and contact details in applicant tracking systems. Staffing specialists prepare monthly, quarterly, and annual hiring status reports with this information. The recruitment specialist handles candidate paperwork, such as contracts, taxes, and other onboarding documents.
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Why Choose to Work With a Staffing Specialist Over an In-house HR Team?
The primary reason to work with a staffing specialist is its cost-effectiveness over hiring internal human resources for your business. Maintaining an internal human resources department results in high costs for expenses such as finding, hiring, onboarding, and training staff. You need to spend money on office space and salaries. Your business may not require full-time employee recruitment, and using temporary recruitment specialist services costs your budget only until your recruitment needs are met. Other reasons are:
Defining Employment Needs
After lesser costs, another reason for choosing a recruiter is that they help you define your needed employee skills. Onboarding hires is expensive and risky. Using data gathered by agencies, employers who use staffing specialists can easily state their hiring needs, measure candidate qualifications, and assess potential candidate productivity to reduce employee turnover, save time and money, and create a stable workplace.
Specialized Skills
A staffing specialist’s role is to present clients with the candidates for a position. They usually have insight and experience in different markets and networking relationships established when your employee needs open. A recruitment specialist agency should be able to put you in touch with recruitment experts with knowledge of your industry. They work with your business to find qualified people with the specific skills you require.
Diverse Candidates
Hiring efficiency is where staffing specialists shine. Staffing companies typically have extensive databases with information about candidates and their backgrounds, such as candidate experience levels, specializations, qualifications, and candidate interest in your business and industry. Specialist staffing services can source employee candidates locally, nationally, and globally for your business. Candidate availability means a stronger and more diverse workforce. A staffing solution specialist helps you hire employees who strengthen your company’s culture with different life experiences, values, and insights. These insights from diversity create an ever-changing workplace with creativity and progressive problem-solving skills.
Hiring Workflow
Hiring great people is critical, but protecting your and your employees’ time is also important. Specialist staffing services can streamline the process and present diverse and qualified consultants. They keep your hiring process on track with regular updates. If you were to opt not to use specialist staffing services, your business would have to fill vacancies with an internal human resources department. Using internal human resources is more costly because the hiring process is lengthier. Removing the burden of recruiting, you have more time to focus on your core business of setting strategies and goals.
Legal Compliance
Keeping track of regulations as they change rapidly is difficult. Using specialist staffing services means your business remains legally compliant. As your business grows, hiring a professional staffing specialist can help you navigate legal questions and regulations. For example, when you reach a certain number of employees, you need to comply with the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). Affirmative action, or other local, state, and federal regulations apply after you reach hiring thresholds. Without a designated staffing professional, your business would have to hire, retain, and pay for in-house legal counsel. Legal costs are sometimes difficult and expensive for small businesses to afford. Staffing specialist services offer a less expensive option.
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Black Diamond: Your Expert Staffing Solution Specialists
At Black Diamond Networks, our staffing services help you determine your hiring needs, flesh out job descriptions, and make informed decisions about candidate skills and talents, the hiring workflow, and legal compliance. We have contract staffing specialists for flexible hiring help requirements. Reaching diverse and qualified employee candidates is our strength. For more information, contact us at Black Diamond Networks today!
