Why We’re a Retained Recruitment Agency

If you’ve been poking around on our website, you’ll notice that we use the phrase ‘retained recruitment’ to describe what we do.

If you’ve got experience in recruitment, it’s probably a term you’ve heard thrown around before. But if you’re still getting to grips with all the different terminology involved in hiring a marketing team, you might be wondering ‘What is retained search in recruitment?’.

There are a range of different approaches to recruitment used in the industry, and retained recruitment is the model that we at The Marketists prefer. In this article, we’re going to discuss why we’re a retained recruitment agency, what this process involves and what the benefits are.

What is Retained Recruitment?

Retained recruitment is an approach that involves an agency or a recruiter being paid an upfront fee to work with a company to fill a role. A recruiter will use their agency’s existing candidate pool and other sourcing methods to find a candidate that meets the employer’s requirements, often taking the time to properly understand the role requirements and company culture.

This isn’t the traditional method of recruitment, which we’ll discuss in a moment, but it is becoming increasingly popular in today’s job market where talented candidates are harder to source and workplace culture fit is more of a priority for employers. Retained recruitment services also tend to be used more for executive search, as these positions require more qualified and experienced candidates.

Contingency vs Retained Recruitment: What’s the Difference?

Contingency recruitment is a ‘traditional’ approach to recruitment that used to be the norm in the industry. It involved recruiters only being paid for their services when they placed a candidate, which bred an approach to hiring that prioritised speed over quality.

With a contingency recruitment approach, companies receive a shortlist of candidates that have come from recruiters wanting to be the first to respond to the request to fill a role. These candidates will likely not have been thoroughly screened and may be totally unsuitable for the role.

Retained recruitment differs from continuous recruitment here because the candidates shortlisted for an employer will have been handpicked for the specific role. There’s no incentive to be ‘first’ to find someone to fill the position and no competition from other recruiters, so whilst efficiency is still considered, more attention is given to understanding the role requirements and finding a potential employee that will fit in well with the existing team.

Contingency recruitment may give employers a list of potential candidates sooner, but sifting through this list of applicants can be a time-consuming and ultimately unsuccessful process. Hiring through a contingency model could also mean that you end up giving the role to somebody unsuitable, which can cost your company a lot of money and waste your time.

The difference with retained recruitment is that, whilst the sourcing process might be more thorough, you end up with a shortlist of much higher-quality candidates. This saves a lot of time as screening has already been completed and candidates who are hired are more likely to integrate quickly and start delivering value sooner than someone less suitable.

So when it comes to contingency vs retained recruitment, the differences are quite stark. The way in which recruiters are compensated completely changes the approach, and we believe that the retained recruitment model leads to better quality recruitment.

Our Retained Recruitment Process

At The Marketists, we wanted to do recruitment differently to save marketing companies the hassle and disappointment of chasing the wrong kinds of candidates. This is why we’ve based our hiring approach on the retained recruitment model, ensuring that only the best candidates are recommended to our clients.

Getting to Know You

Our retained recruitment process starts with your business. Our team will take the time to properly understand what you’re about, getting a good feel for your organisational culture, internal processes and ways of working.

This understanding helps us to get a good idea of the kinds of candidates who are really going to fit into your team as well as make an impact on your marketing efforts. Once we know what constitutes a successful hire, we can craft the perfect job advert to catch their attention.

Employment Branding

As part of our retained recruitment process, we also focus on helping your company improve your employment brand. This refers to the impression that you give to potential candidates as an employer, involving things like the benefits you offer and the workplace experience that your employees have.

By helping you to improve your employer brand, we help to define precisely the kind of company you are, which makes it easier to identify your ideal employee. Not only does this make our job easier when it comes to finding the perfect candidate, but it also makes you more attractive to the candidates you interview, increasing the likelihood that they’ll accept a job offer.

Enticing Job Adverts

Retained recruitment relies on recruiters putting the work in to find candidates that fit a job role, and we do this through unique and carefully crafted job adverts. By designing job adverts with our marketer hats on, we promote the roles you have available with job adverts that really stand out and are tailored to appeal to your target candidates.

Pre-Approved Candidate Shortlist

A high-quality and pre-screened candidate shortlist is a key feature of the retained recruitment process. We only send you candidates that meet the skill and personality requirements of your role, ensuring that you won’t end up wasting time interviewing unsuitable applicants.

By pre-screening candidates on your behalf, we also help to reduce the time it takes for a new employee to get settled in by ensuring they have the skills and ability to quickly get to grips with the role. 

Refined Recruitment Procedure

We’ll work with you to audit and refine your existing recruitment procedure, integrating the process with our own retained search. You’ll end up with interview processes that are more efficient and engaging and an onboarding approach that helps increase retention, both of which can help boost revenue.

The Benefits of Retained Recruitment

We talked about the difference between retained recruitment and the more traditional contingency recruitment approach. But what about the overall benefits of retained recruitment?

Dedicated Focus

When you work with a retained recruitment agency, you get a recruitment partner who is dedicated to helping you fill your open positions. They’re not racing to find candidates for a range of different companies; they’re taking the time to understand and meet your requirements. 

Higher Quality Candidates

We’ve already highlighted how a retained approach leads to more suitable candidates because of the time taken to understand the role requirements and screen applicants based on a wide range of traits. But retained recruitment can also source more skilled candidates because it doesn’t just look at sourcing applications who are actively looking for jobs, but also targets passive candidates that would be the perfect fit for your marketing team.

Increased Employee Retention

Using a retained recruitment approach can help to increase employee retention because it ensures that you’re hiring candidates who are equipped for the responsibilities of their roles and well-suited to the work environment that your company offers. This significantly reduces the likelihood that they’ll leave the role in the first couple of months, and also helps to improve their engagement at enjoyment of work, which means they’re likely to want to stay with your company for longer.

Personalised Approach

Finally, one of the standout benefits of retained recruitment is that it uses a personalised approach to find the best candidates for your business. The sourcing strategy and screening process will be unique to your requirements, and because the recruiter is working alongside your business as part of your HR team, you can tailor how you attract and hire the right candidates based on their recommendations and your needs.

Summary

Contingency recruitment is becoming more of an outdated approach in the recruitment industry, but there are still agencies out there using the model to deliver a less-than-perfect recruitment service. We’re loud and proud of our opinions that recruitment can and should be done better than that, and the retained recruitment model is one of the best ways to offer a more effective service to help companies find their ideal employees. 

Like the sound of how we do things? Find out more about The Marketists’ recruitment services or get in touch to speak to the team about how we can improve your recruitment efforts.