Do You Work With Recruiters to Hire?

Until this year, I never understood why companies would cough up 10-30% of a new hire’s first year salary to a recruiter. With LinkedIn searches and countless ways to promote jobs and find people on the internet, I did not see how the cost justifies having someone else do the searching for a business.

As I mentioned yesterday, this year our inbound pool of applicants has not provided sufficient numbers of acceptable new hires for our business. So we’ve worked harder at outbound and referral based leads for recruiting. We’ve also received many resumes from inbound recruiters. These resumes are not better than our standard inbound pool of applicants. To be fair, we have never specifically developed a targeted recruiter relationship to see if that can be improved.

I know there are recruiters that are awesome at what they do. I’m wondering if any reader’s of this blog have some insight to provide that would cause me to look harder at using recruiters?

A couple of comments:

I like what Pardot did in offering a fixed fee for any referral that comes from a recruiter or otherwise. We have not yet formulated a similar policy, but we are considering it.
I understand that super-high-growth-startups need to think outside the box and pour resources into adding people. This is an exception more than a rule, so I’m not interested in discussing that corner case.
I am interested in exploring our use case which is that we want to be adding people every month. We are looking for people who have a clear targeted skill set and are highly proficient at those skills.

What are your opinions about working with recruiters? Do you think 10-30% is worth the recruiter’s contribution? What rate have you paid recruiters in the last 2 years?

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