What is Recruitment-as-a-Service (RaaS)?

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It’s estimated that, despite the data showing that 60% of new businesses fail within 3 years, 726,000 new businesses were started in 2020.

There’s one differentiating factor though that underlies a new business’ success (HINT: it’s not marketing or funding), and that is its people.

The right people, for the right startup, drive the right culture, marketing, funding, and product and its why hiring is often the #1 issue on a founder/CEO’s mind.

There’s traditionally three options when trying to hire fast.        

1.       Your Network

Every hiring team’s dream. No agency fees and/or hiring people you trust through recommendations. There’s a reason why employee referral schemes exist even at the biggest companies.

However, there comes a point where, no matter how connected your team is, your network dries up whether due to the quality or quantity of people you know, or whether due to your company’s brand. At a certain point, you’ll need to pay someone with specialist skills to help grow your team.

2.       Going In-house

This could mean relying on your HR team that may not have recruitment as a priority, or even as a primary skill set. Alternatively, you could look to build a talent team of in-house recruiters.

With that being said though, there’s a lot more that goes into building a recruitment process than calling up candidates, so this is no doubt an investment that could take time with expensive mistakes made along the way.

3.       Recruitment Agencies

Traditionally, recruitment has been seen as a “just get the job done” industry where clients undoubtedly benefit from recruiters who have both the network and skillset to find ideal candidates and convince them to join.

However, in many cases, both client and agency look at each hire through a narrow, short-term lens, meaning that each hire is costly without the recruitment agency truly being an extension of the business it’s recruiting for.

No doubt, traditional recruitment has its value when companies are trying to hire fast and hire well, but the transactional nature is what has seen the shift to in-house teams and “no agencies please”

4.       A New Approach: RaaS?

Based on this trend, wouldn’t the ideal solution be one that combines the stellar networking and skills of a recruitment agency, but with the trust & partnering of an internal team that’s a part of your culture.

Recruitment-as-a-Service is the exact solution. It’s a completely different type of approach, contractual agreement and incentive for the recruitment model.

Transactional recruitment means that the recruiter’s motivations are to find candidate, place candidate and repeat.

RaaS on the other hand, is closer to a managed service, where typically, the recruitment agency charges a fixed monthly fee for a fixed term to hire up to a fixed number of hires.

This changes the game. From a relationship based on commissions to a strategic partnership where RaaS recruiters act as an extension of your team with the necessary tools, network, skills and now cultural fit, to hire the right people for the long-term.

With the onus for recruitment strategies to become more culturally diverse and inclusive, there’s equally more need for the recruitment model to factor in the long-term.

The first step is obviously assessing whether it’s the right solution for you, as options1,2 and 3 will forever have its place. However, if you do decide to embark on this path, the key benefits to measure RaaS agencies against are:

1.       Does the agency have a long-term strategy/vision?

2.       Do they have the experience and resources to help you?

3.       Do they have the tech stack you need to be effective, or are you better off doing yourself?

4.       Do they have the expertise to not only listen to your recruitment process, but also improve it?

Assuming you can answer yes to the suitability of RaaS, and you can find a partner who answers yes to all of the above, it’s a novel approach to recruitment that you should definitely consider.

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To hear more about our approach to RaaS, feel free to contact us here.