Flat Fee Recruitment. What exactly is it?

Hello hello, Don here – I’m an online marketing and social media consultant at Net Natives and will be discussing all things social, engaging and recruitmenty and hopefully can give some good advice on using social media and online marketing techniques to improve recruitment processes and attract more visitors to your site.

Today I want to talk a little bit about Flat Fee Recruitment, one of our key areas of speciality for www.NetNatives.co.uk but something that too many businesses have no idea what it is or that something this good can be really true.

It’s a not too long an article (I promise!), but in it I am going to explain not only what Flat Fee Recruitment is but that it …

1. is the future of recruitment in the UK
2. will force every business to rethink how they recruit and what they want from their services
3. is suitable for nearly EVERY vacancy in the UK
4. is a flat rate per role, no matter the salary
5. puts the candidates and clients closer
6. ensures that the client has ownership of all candidate relationship
7. combines innovative use of technology with manual filtering
8. provides a transparent high value service should be at the heart of all good flat fee recruitment services.

Flat Fee Recruitment is becoming the industry standard name, but you’ll also hear it referred to as fixed fee recruitment, flat rate recruitment or unbundled recruitment (this phrase is mainly used by the traditional recruitment agencies, who we know, don’t have a clue what it is).

Basically if everyone is using the internet to find jobs, the service of recruitment companies has changed from being direct sources of talent to being response managers of applications. The best candidates are all available online and respond to the adverts, but the recruitment companies haven’t changed their pricing models.

Traditional recruiters have been providing job board posting, response management and candidate selection services for years. Where have the cost savings been for the clients? Why do the candidates that applied for the job belong to the recruitment company’s database not the end hiring client? Why did the recruiters earn more for higher salary jobs when the job board charges were the same no matter what the salary was?  All has to change and the downturn has helped expose these failings.

Quick bit of background that we all know – for the last year or so the recruitment industry has been f0rced to adapt due to a surge in unemployment turning the market from candidate driven to employer driven. This had been coupled with businesses heavily reducing their recruitment spend and using their internal HR teams to recruit new staff. The tide has been turning even before recession hit with job boards like TotalJobs and Monster becoming the primary job search method for millions of job hunters.

This changing environment has spawned a demand for a cost effective, transparent recruitment service – one that uses the enhancements in online recruitment. Flat Fee Recruitment! No longer can recruitment firms expect the bloated, percentage determined fees they have relied on for years for services that were convoluted, at best, disingenuous, at worst. We saw the bubble finally burst in the property market and the same will be true of the UK recruitment industry.

Hiring companies are still turning to traditional recruiters because of the cost for job posting and the massive amount of time spent filtering all of the applications. But this is why there is now a 3^rd way to recruit – Flat Fee Recruitment.

A good flat fee recruitment service should include multiple job board posting, manual response management and candidate filtering as standard. It should embrace technological developments like CV parsing. Traditional recruitment companies have not seen the value of advanced applicant tracking systems or technologies like CV parsing and their customers have suffered. By working closely with customers to determine their exact requirement clever use of kill questions and online application forms can be utilised so the maximum value is added. Also handing the client control of their candidate shortlists with their own dedicated applicant tracking system account ensures absolute transparency.

If you feel differently, or can expand on my definition please comment. We’d love to know your thoughts.