4 Best Practices When Choosing a Recruitment Agency

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The current health crisis, combined with labor shortages, has caused companies around the world to rethink how and where to find their talent and establish their teams, and many of them have turned to the agencies. This article discusses what you need to know before choosing a recruitment agency to make sure it's the right agency for your business.

Offshoring as is not new; it has been used for decades. What has changed, however, is the what, why and who of offshoring. At the start of the offshoring trend, the answer to the "what" question was the manufacturing process; the answer to "why" was to cut costs by taking advantage of cheap labor; and the answer to "who" was the big companies that could open their manufacturing plant overseas.

Today, with all the technological advances that have been made to accompany the current situation, the answers to these questions have evolved favorably. Companies are outsourcing all kinds of functions and jobs: from administration, virtual assistant, customer service and finance to digital design and information technology. Lowering costs is less relevant, as access to a global talent pool has become the priority and is no longer the preserve of large companies.

Related: Need to Hire? The advantages of using a recruitment agency.

Outsourcing versus offshoring

Before detailing the key practices to put in place when choosing a recruitment agency, it is essential to clarify the distinction between outsourcing and offshoring to avoid misunderstandings.

Outsourcing or Business Process Outsourcing (BPO): Outsourcing occurs when a company outsources its entire process, giving control of the employees and the outsourced process to a third party. In short, the company pays for a process to be completed.

Offshore and Nearshore Recruitment: Offshoring occurs when a company moves to another country to recruit staff. In this case, the company pays an agency to hire and manage all aspects of staffing (employee records, legal compliance, payroll), but the staff reports directly to the company; the process is not outsourced. The difference between offshore and nearshore personnel is that the former involves a foreign company, while the latter involves a neighboring country.

Design, for example, is an important function that can be outsourced, assuming your company doesn't specialize in design and doesn't have a large enough workload to justify hiring an employee at full-time. However, if you are a design or marketing firm, you are better off using a staffing firm to build and manage a remote team of designers working directly under your supervision within company guidelines, training and policies. . In this situation, outsourcing the design is not a recommended option.

What to Consider When Finding the Right Nearshore or Offshore Recruitment Agency

As you can see, there are many ways to grow your team. In our company, Remote Team Solutions, we have seen many success stories: from a company that started with one employee and grew to over ten team members in less than two years to a company that initially outsourced its call center and now has its entire call center telecommuted. Our company has identified four game-changing practices when choosing the right nearshore or offshore recruitment agency. These practices are listed below.

1. Be ready and prepared

Working remotely is not the same as having your employees in the office. When you use a staffing agency, you need to be prepared, have the tools, processes and job descriptions in place, and know exactly what you expect from your overseas employees.