When the competition for talent is fierce, recruitment evolution is essential to stay ahead of the hiring curve.
This is acutely relevant in the world of fashion and retail. These sectors draw their talent from an incredibly diverse candidate base, and each designer, retail operation or supply chain enterprise requires a very specific set of skills to remain functional in a fast-changing industry.
One of the most effective ways to find the right people quickly, affordably, and sustainably is by engaging with people who already have the right sort of talent connections – specialist recruitment agencies.
Specialist recruitment agencies differ from your standard recruitment agency by helping hire for niche industries, and by curating focused candidate bases and talent pools to serve sector-specific functions, on-demand.
The benefits of bringing a specialist third-party talent acquisition company on board are numerous – from cost effectiveness to brand reach, the ROI is immediate and tangible.
We’re here to give you a full breakdown of why using a specialist recruitment agency is often the best choice for your company.
Deep industry knowledge
The most immediate and powerful tools in a recruitment agency’s kit are extensive, well-proven, and specialist industry knowledge.
Often, specialist agencies will be run by people who have worked in their representative industry and as such have little black books full of people just like them. The talent they represent will, more often than not, be hand-picked, niche-qualified, high-quality candidates.
Generalist agencies, on the other hand, may have a good spread of candidates and will bring a sense of diversity to your applicant list, but what they lack is niche industry clarity and knowledge of trends, people, skillsets, HR and talent acquisition strategies.
Time efficiency
Even in the digital age, recruitment takes time. But one of the chief complaints by candidates across almost every industry is that recruitment simply takes too long.
Specialist agencies cut out the time wasted in the middle by pre-administering to niche hires. This includes things like reference checking, right-to-work checking, pre-interviewing, skills testing, and work culture assessments.
What you get, as an employer, is a fully prepped, well-analysed candidate in your inbox – this saves weeks of back and forth and streamlines recruitment immediately.
Candidate reach and diversity
Investment in recruitment shouldn’t be scattergun – the more targeted you can be the better.
Combine this with the added market and trend knowledge of a specialist agency, and you’re well on the way to finding your ideal hire.
Both specialist and generalist agencies have focused reach into talent pools. But if you were given a choice between 20 potential candidates and 5 perfect candidates, who would you choose?
Specialist recruitment agencies are known for curating niche talent bases of both active and passive job seekers and can hire with laser-focus on diverse talent within your niche.
Professionalism across the hiring spectrum
We touched on this briefly above, but it’s worth reiterating – recruitment agencies do the following without you even asking for it:
- Screening applications
- Conducting interviews
- Checking references
- Carrying out tailored assessments
- Interview coordination and hosting
- Verifying credentials sometimes included DBS checks
- Onboarding collaboration
- Salary negotiation
This puts you safe in the knowledge that all the necessary requirements in the hiring process are being covered professionally, leaving you with more time to focus on other business needs.
Full spectrum hiring flexibility
Consider the following situations:
- A company is finding a sudden increase in new orders or workload that requires a team scale-up. They need a certain number of people in short order, who understand niche skills and can start at a sprint. Do you dive into LinkedIn and try your luck on job boards? Or do you connect with a specialist who already has those connections and can leverage your brand, your culture, and your pay to the right people?
- Or what if a company is experiencing a high rate of absenteeism or has had a sudden increase in staff turnover? Time is money, and with a smaller team dealing with more work, recruitment can sometimes take a back seat. This, again, is where specialist recruitment agencies make the most impact – providing a pool of candidates who are available to work on demand, helping you retain staff, not just hire them.
Part of Jaymes Byron’s own mission is to provide the fashion & retail industry with a variety of accessible recruitment services that suit individual needs.
For example, our tailored recruitment solutions offer different routes to hiring – from quickly filling ad-hoc roles to multi-hiring project management – to suit any and every organisation size in the conscious fashion and retail industry.
Cost-effectiveness
Bad hires cost a lot of money:
“According to Oxford Economics and Unum, the average cost of taking on an employee (on a salary of £25k) is £30,165”.
Making sure your recruitment processes are fit for purpose avoids overspending and wasting money on poor hires.
A recruitment agency, specialist ones most effectively, help mitigate this financial risk and provide context, care, and attention to hires that fit your niche needs.
Employee retention
This is the not-so-secret weapon of a recruitment agency – they are your staff retention gurus, helping craft a culture of employee support and recruitment positivity that creates a welcoming, effective workforce.
Simply put, a well-matched employee is more likely to stay with any given company longer, which leads to lower turnover rates, and in turn, cost savings.
But beyond that, recruitment agencies fight your corner and that of the candidate, helping mitigate applicant drop-offs, helping augment your employer brand, and stretching your company into new and exciting talent markets.
At Jaymes Byron, our client and job intake meetings, and candidate assessments are heavily focused on matching not just competencies, but also values, purpose, and cultural fit.
All of this leads to happier staff, who feel more welcomed and valued, and motivates them to stay at an employer longer.
Finally, continuous representation
Recruitment agencies aren’t fair-weather staffing resources – they are always registering candidates and reaching into the market to maintain talent connections.
If you only hire once every year, you have to restart the process of digging into talent markets, connecting with passive candidates, and interviewing and administering active candidates, all of which puts pressure on HR teams to rehash and rebuild the same strategies again and again before letting them lapse.
Alongside this is the potential turnover of a business’s internal recruiting function. Whether it’s one person or a team that is doing your recruitment internally, when they leave, for whatever reason, it’s back to the drawing board on many levels. This can include having to retrain a new hire on the company’s values and what the right talent fit is, so they can provide the right representation to the talent market. It can often mean rebuilding a company’s talent pool and network from scratch. And it most often means losing track of past recruitment activities.
Partnering with a specialist recruiter means uninterrupted and high-quality hiring regardless of the state of your internal talent acquisition teams. That is a priceless resource to have when you need best-in-class talent whatever internal challenges are thrown your way!
James Byron Talent provides professional recruitment services to the sustainably conscious fashion & retail industry, ensuring recruitment is another positive link in your supply chain.
To find out how we help fashion and retail companies hire amazing people, simply get in touch!
