Employment agencies are companies that concentrate on the filling of job vacancies. Some agencies concentrate on specific vocational areas like IT, administration or sales. All agencies charge a fee for these services. The fee varies from agency to agency and sometimes from customer to customer.
Customers are the companies who make use of employment agencies to find their employees for them. Customers are found, generally, by cold calling and marketing of good Curriculum Vitae. Cold calling is the process of systematically working your way through a list of companies, calling each one and attempting to sell a product, in this case – employment services. Marketing a Curriculum Vita entails calling companies who are in the applicants field of expertise and attempting to convince the company that they want to hire the applicant.
Applicants are the people who send their Curriculum Vitae to the employment agency in order to find a job. The applicants can be unemployed or employed. They are often filed according to their most recent work experience. When a job vacancy comes in, consultants go through their database of Curriculum Vitae and find the current applicants who best fit the job specification. They will contact the applicants they have selected and either conduct a telephonic interview or schedule a face-to-face interview. This is to make sure that the applicants are truly suited to the customer and the position. Should there be no suitable applicants in the database, the employment consultant will place adverts on the internet and in newspapers to attract suitable applicants.
Once the customer has been sent a few Curriculum Vitae for their position, they will select applicants to interview themselves. It is then up to the consultant to schedule these interviews and obtain feedback once they have been completed. From these applicants, a customer will select a short list or decide which applicant they wish to employ. Once the customer has employed an applicant, they become liable to the employment agency for a fee.
Employment agencies often offer other services as well as the staffing solutions. They may offer ad-response handling, Curriculum Vita writing and interview coaching. It is entirely dependent on what the agency wishes to do.
Many companies do not wish to use employment agencies due to the costs involved. Also, many large companies have their own divisions which provide these services. The main customers for employment agencies are the small to medium sized businesses with no human resources dedicated department or with a very small human resources department. Many customers will also enlist a number of employment agencies in order to be given a larger selection of Curriculum Vitae without being overrun by applicants.
This is where ad-response handling comes into play. The aim of this service is to take care of the incoming applicants’ mail and to sift through the Curriculum Vitae to find the suitable applicants. This way, the company does not pay the employment agency a fee for placing a applicant and doing all the work for them, but only for doing a small part of the work. The customer still has to screen the suitable applicants and select which ones they wish to interview, schedule the interviews and short list the applicants.
Employment agencies may cost customers money, but they decrease the work load tremendously.