Staffing
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Traditionally, IT staffing refers to a company working with an outside IT staffing service agency to recruit professionals and connect with qualified job seekers. But IT staffing can be accomplished internally through an HR team, as well.
As technology evolves, these roles will only become more specialized. Recruiters and hiring managers need to understand they’re filling positions that require subject matter experts with specific IT skill sets.
Pros of IT staffing
There are a lot of positives to working with a staffing firm. Here are a few to keep in mind:
- The process might move faster than if your business handled recruiting and hiring on its own.
- Staffing companies might provide access to a wider pool of top talent. Since they’re established recruiters, they already have a pool of job seekers to cull from, and as hiring experts, they understand how to reach others.
- These firms could help you connect with workers with highly specialized skills.
- Having others focus on hiring could free up more of your time and other resources. The less time you spend interviewing candidates and reviewing applications, the more time you can spend on managing your team and focusing on IT projects.
Cons of IT staffing
There are also potential drawbacks to using an IT staffing solution. Some disadvantages include:
- Working with a recruiting firm can be more costly, as the markup on a worker hired through these firms can be as much as 100% of their hourly wage. That’s a lot of money to spend when a direct hire can be much less expensive. Do you want the hiring process to eat into that much of your budget?
- You typically have less control over the hiring process when working with a middleman—the staffing agency representative—which could be frustrating for some IT business leaders.
- There’s potential for lack of transparency and communication issues if you’re not fully in the loop about who the agency is talking to and where they stand in the hiring process. This could slow the process down, and if you’re not intimately involved every step of the way, you could wind up with a pool of candidates you wouldn’t have selected yourself.
- The staffing agency’s pool of workers might not fit your specialized IT needs. We’ve already talked about how IT jobs can be highly niche. If you’re not working with a company that specifically deals with IT talent, you might be wasting your time, as many of them likely don’t have access to the technical talent you need.
- If you’re not interviewing and assessing candidates yourself, you may not get a feel for whether a candidate fits in well with your company culture. It would be a shame to spend the time, money, and other resources hiring a candidate who your hiring manager might have weeded out early in the process once they realized they weren’t a good fit culture-wise.