Recruitment is a crucially important function for any type of dealership.
Without having the right staff on board, your business can’t function properly, and customer satisfaction quickly declines; but with the cost involved in recruitment fees, you may be questioning whether using a recruitment agency is really worth it, or if you’d be better off managing it yourself.
While managing your recruitment activity yourself is an option, there are a few benefits to outsourcing it to a professional agency.
It can relieve the pressure on your business
It‘s easy to underestimate the amount of time it takes to make a single hire. There’s far more involved than simply posting a job advertisement and picking the best candidate.
First, you need to define exactly what it is that you’re looking for. Then you need to develop the job description, post the job advertisement, respond to each application you receive, screen each candidate, schedule and conduct interviews and assessments, and assess each candidate’s performance. Then you also need to think about the onboarding process, including induction and training for the successful candidate.
If you don’t have a dedicated in-house recruiter and you’re already one or more staff members down, all of this will take time away from the dealership and place additional pressure on other employees that need to pick up the extra workload left behind by the staff members managing the recruitment process.
A recruitment agency can relieve that pressure by managing a large part of the process for you, freeing you and your workers up to focus on your core business; and in an already busy working environment, anything that will relieve pressure is sure to be worth its weight in gold.
They can find candidates you couldn’t find yourself
The best candidates aren’t always actively looking to change jobs. Even if you write a brilliant job advertisement, there’s a good chance that it will never be seen by your ideal candidate. That’s where recruitment agencies can be invaluable—and industry-specific recruiters in particular.
They’re working to fill similar vacancies within the industry day in, day out and have an intimate knowledge of the current recruitment landscape.
They’ll most likely have a sizable candidate database which they could immediately check for any good matches, or they may even know of someone they recently interviewed for another role that could be perfect. They’re also likely to have built a solid network of industry connections and contacts which they could utilise and may even be able to ‘headhunt’ someone with a very specific skill set that’s very hard to come by.
They can do it better, and faster
Just like you’re an expert in your field, professional recruiters are experts in theirs. They live and breathe recruitment every day and know how everything works inside-out.
Their systems and processes are refined, and they’re equipped to manage a large influx of applications, while ensuring each applicant receives appropriate and regular updates about the progress of their application. They can conduct the initial applicant screening process for you, and only hand you the best of the bunch to consider.
They can also make it easier to navigate the entire process, while ensuring you adopt best-practice techniques and processes.
They can help you uncover what you’re really looking for in a new recruit and are specially trained in candidate assessment to help you find the one that best fits the bill. They know how to structure interviews most effectively and can also help you develop psychometric or aptitude tests if necessary.
In most cases, they would also be very familiar with current privacy, anti-discrimination, and equal opportunity legislation to help you conduct the entire process appropriately and fairly.
While it’s true that nobody knows your dealership better than you do, a professional recruitment agency has the insights and know-how to be able to translate your business requirements into a hiring strategy that will yield the best results—and remember, quite often if they can’t fill the role, you won’t have to pay a placement fee, so you won’t be any worse off for choosing to engage their services.
Teamrecruit is Australia’s most established recruitment agency specialising in truck, earthmoving and agricultural machinery dealerships in Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. Find out more about Teamrecruit and how we support employers and candidates in the dealership industry.
