The Ultimate Guide to On-Demand Recruiting

How Does On-Demand Recruiting Help Fill Your Talent Gaps?

On-demand talent helps you fill your talent gaps by customizing the recruiting process to align with your needs. In particularly volatile markets or markets that face unpredicted obstacles, on-demand talent offers comfort in knowing you can adjust the level of involvement as needed.

In highly competitive hiring industries, on-demand recruiting can be used to:

• Hire for specific roles — build out your ideal candidate profile and sift through a network of potential candidates who fit the mold.

• Keep candidate searches confidential — when fighting over a small number of candidates, you want to keep your recruiting efforts confidential to reduce the level of competition.

• Provide consistent support — on-demand recruiters are talent experts you can rely on when you need them most.

On-demand talent experts have experience in engaging with and recruiting all kinds of talent. Whether you are hiring for a management position, a contract-based or project-based role, or a C-suite executive, you can ensure you’ve got access to a solid group of qualified candidates.

What Are The Disadvantages Of On-Demand Recruiting?

While on-demand recruiting is a practice with many benefits, there are some potential pitfalls to be aware of. Like every investment, it takes a learning curve to become as collaborative, effective, and efficient as possible. The following two things are common struggles that organizations face when they first start using an on-demand recruiting service.

Onboarding Can Get Backed Up

With any hiring team, there needs to be a comprehensive onboarding process to ensure your new talent is equipped with the knowledge and tools needed to be successful. This is the same whether the candidate you hire is fresh to the job market or has many years of industry experience. On-demand recruiters often help reduce the amount of time needed to find and hire employees, so your internal team needs to ensure your onboarding process is efficient. The last thing you want is for your onboarding efforts to get backed up, resulting in a longer wait time for employees to maximize productivity.

If You Aren’t Careful, Your Goals Can Become Misaligned

When you work with an external hiring partner, there is always the risk of misaligning your goals. While many on-demand partners put forth the proper effort to understand your needs and culture, there is a chance that they may not fully evaluate the kind of values and competencies you are looking for in a new hire. As you begin a partnership with your on-demand recruiter, ensure you provide ample context as to the ideal candidate profile. Start by shedding light on the daily life in your organization along with the mission and values of your existing team and company. This will help to bridge the gap and enable your on-demand partner to recruit a more accurate candidate.

The potential pitfalls of on-demand recruiting are far outweighed by the benefits your organization will see. By taking the time to communicate your goals and expectations of one another, you can easily build a strong partnership that will save you time and money and will help you source a skilled workforce.

Talent On-Demand Best Practices

When you invest in a talent on-demand firm, you want to be sure that you’re making a smart investment. After all, it’s your money, and you don’t want to see it wasted. To ensure a strong ROI, you need to make a conscious effort to build out a comprehensive and reliable plan. By sticking to the latest best practices for outsourcing recruitment services, you can set your partnership off on the right track.

Create A Roadmap For Success

The best way to set yourself up for success is by creating a clearly defined plan for achieving your goals. What is the overall mission of the partnership? What do you expect from one another? How will you support one another in these ventures? It is important to take the time to sit down and have a transparent conversation. When you both clearly understand what you hope to achieve and how you will get there, you increase the likelihood of a successful partnership.

It’s All About The Brand, Baby

Think of all the new technologies and sites that job seekers use today to connect with and research companies. With all the information anyone could ever want or need at their fingertips, ensuring the message and brand you project to others is the one you wish to show is crucial. You need to ensure you’re using social media accounts to their fullest potential. Share pictures of employee events, parties, and behind-the-scenes posts to showcase the values and culture of your organization. Curate a strong online presence to contact individuals and promote open positions in your company. A positive employer brand will help you to attract and retain more qualified individuals.

Tell Them Who You Want, Who You Really, Really Want

It takes knowing your ideal candidate to be able to find and hire the right person. Work together with your talent on-demand firm to flesh out this profile before you even begin your search.

Ask yourself:

• What level of experience do they have?

• Which skills are necessary to do the role well?

• How quickly do you expect them to be up to speed on processes?

• What timezone(s) can the ideal worker be in?

• Is this a role that can be done remotely, or is it in person?

While you fill out the answers to these questions, it will help calibrate the ideal candidate profile. Make sure that your on-demand firm understands this employee profile to avoid wasting time interviewing subpar candidates.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket

A good talent on-demand partner knows that keeping all your sourcing strategies limited to one platform is a bad move. You’ll have much better chances of finding the absolute best fit if you spread your efforts out among a variety of candidate sourcing tools. You can, and should be, promoting open positions at your company on your social media profiles to increase awareness, using employee referral programs to find strong talent from your employees’ networks, using great boolean search to find passive candidates, and uploading the job description to multiple job posting boards to cast a large talent net. When you use more than one channel to source candidates, you have more opportunities to find qualified talent that fits well with your company culture.

The ROI of On-Demand Talent

On-demand talent isn't just about filling talent gaps; it's a strategic tool that provides an impressive return on investment (ROI). Here's how:

Cost Efficiency: Traditional recruitment methods can wreak havoc on your budget, especially during peak hiring periods or when you're trying to fill multiple roles. That’s where on-demand talent comes in - a service where you only pay for what you need, significantly reducing your overall recruitment expenditure.

Time Savings: The recruitment process, from sourcing to hiring, is notoriously time-consuming. When you use on-demand talent, we take these tasks off your plate, freeing up your team to focus on revenue-generating activities. It's not just a time saver; it's a money saver too.

Reduced Turnover: On-demand recruiters are experts at finding the perfect fit for your company culture and job requirements. By getting it right from the start, turnover rates decrease, saving your organization the considerable costs associated with employee replacement. 

Scalability: Need to ramp up recruitment or dial it down? When using on-demand talent, you can adjust your recruitment efforts based on your current needs. No more throwing money at unnecessary recruitment activities during slower periods.

Access to a Larger Talent Pool: On-demand recruiters often have their fingers on the pulse of a larger and more diverse talent pool than your internal team. This means access to higher-quality hires and a more diverse workforce, contributing to improved business performance and, you guessed it, a better ROI.

Data-Driven Decisions: Many on-demand talent services offer detailed analytics and reporting, enabling you to make decisions about your hiring processes based on hard data. These insights can lead to more effective recruitment strategies and better hires, further enhancing your ROI.

The IQTalent Way

IQTalent sets the bar for candidate sourcing and recruiting outsourcing. With over 200 U.S.-based consultants, we can handle any request from anyone. Our adaptable and flexible approach to recruitment saves you time and money, augmenting your internal team and molding to fit your specific needs. When you work with us, our team of experts quickly adds a wealth of advice, expertise, and experience that integrates with your internal team.

Unlike traditional recruiting firms, at IQTalent, we give you full access to any candidate information we obtain. All candidate information and recruiting data we compile is yours, forever. We believe that transparency is crucial for the success of any partnership, which is why we offer you complete access to your data. After working with us, you’ll be able to better predict and prepare for future hiring demands, offering you greater control and added resilience in your organization.

And you can’t forget about the best part — IQTalent bills by the hour.

Our model is flexible and adaptable, meaning we work on an on-demand basis. We charge you only for the services you use, not the ones you don’t. Our business approach makes our services affordable for businesses of all shapes and sizes. You’ll be happy with the candidates we find you, and your finance team will be happy with the value we create!

Talent On-Demand Case Study

We get it. You’re results-driven, and you want to be sure that you can trust our expertise. But don’t worry! After years of experience, we’ve got the data to back us up.

IQTalent Supports Your Needs, Regardless Of Size

The benefit of operating as a talent on-demand firm is that we have the privilege of helping organizations scale their businesses, regardless of their size. We’ve helped large companies ramp up hiring, mid-sized businesses expand their human talent, and have even assisted start-ups with building out a strong team to launch their business to the next level. IQTalent's on-demand recruiting model proved to be a perfect match for Mast Reforestation's hiring needs and budget. Assembling a team of consultants swiftly, we bridged the gap between management and potential hires, effectively becoming Mast Reforestation's virtual talent acquisition department.

Our innovative approach allowed us to create candidate profiles, refine job descriptions, map salary expectations, and fill the candidate funnel rapidly. Our consultants found quality candidates who fit the company's culture and mission, achieving an effective cost per hire and an average time-to-hire of under 45 days per role.