When you do have the luxury of waiting for the right candidate. Most American companies are small. Less than 1% have over 500 employees and actually need a large recruiting department to support their hiring needs. That means most companies have either no recruitment support or an HR person has to double as the recruiter. When you have a busy HR person, with people knocking on their door all day long, they can’t focus on recruitment, which makes that process much longer.

Some companies have a recruiting team large enough to perform this task, and many of those recruiters have come over from “the other side” of outsourced, or third-party, recruitment. An in-house team will have direct contact with the HR manager and will understand your company’s needs.

When you can’t make the numbers work. Assuming you have fully analyzed the cost of using your internal team or HR person, you can’t justify the cost required to get outside help.

When you don’t have the luxury of waiting for the right candidate. New clients usually call us when they’re stressed out over an important deadline (or already missed it), and all other methods have failed. Many times, they ask us to find that “purple squirrel” who needs to be hired within a week. Sometimes, we just happen to have recently spoken to that “purple squirrel” and we can meet your special needs quickly. We realize that our business model must be agile and responsive, and when you call us, we need to find that elusive person quickly to earn our fee.

Many professional employment agencies work in niches to survive. That means they cultivate relationships on a continuous basis to build a talent pool for times when clients call and give extremely short deadlines. We know the marketplace, companies, and people to call. We know who’s laying people off – or pushing them out of the door. That domain expertise helps us find the right people quicker than an internal team of recruiters can.

We focus on saving you time and money. We give your HR team and internal hiring managers their time back so they can work on important tasks and don’t incur lost opportunity costs. We should be giving you two or three competitive candidates and making your hiring choice difficult by not knowing which high-quality candidate to pick.

When dealing with the most unpredictable factors in the workplace – human beings – sometimes things go wrong. If, for some reason we place someone with you who doesn’t work out, we support that introduction with a guarantee to replace or refund your money. That can’t happen when you advertise or use your internal team. You would just have to start all over again and continue incurring costs.