Regardless of business size, hiring the right employees is a crucial task. For hiring managers, it could be difficult to choose the best person for the position if you don’t have in-depth knowledge about the different recruitment models in the IT staffing industry.
Now, this is not to say that some models are better than the others. Each of these strategies has its own sets of pros and cons, but we must choose what’s the best for a particular job description, company and its values.
In this article, we shed light on the different hiring models in IT staffing, and what could be the best for your enterprise:
1. Rate Card Model
Similar to contractual staffing, the rate card model works when a company wants to purchase professional hiring services for their IT staff. IT staffing can include app developers, graphic developers, marketers and engineers, and is a well-known form of outsourcing labour to other enterprises.
This is a helpful method when the hiring manager needs to increase their talent pool yet while controlling the expenditure that goes toward maintaining the employees.
Each partner organisation would get a rate card that is important to establishing and maintaining the professional relationship between the two agencies.
2. The Mark-up Recruitment Model
The IT staffing mark-up recruitment model refers to the fees charged above the salary paid to a temporary or contractual employee. Thus, the client has a say in the pay rate of the employee. It is a good decision when the open job position has an open salary or falls into a range.
On the other hand, a flat bill rate is used for fixed wages in a regular IT company. You can have a regular fixed pay per hour for all the employees, and can completely rely on the staffing agency for the pay rate.
The salary includes the national payroll tax, local and state payroll taxes along with the employee’s compensation insurance, paid leave and health benefits among other perks.
3. Recruitment Process Outsourcing
Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) refers to a business strategy where the enterprise outsources the recruitment to a third-party hiring agency to enjoy efficiency, scalability, quality, cost and service benefits.
The best recruitment agency blends in the latest technology, a dedicated recruitment team and good hiring practices for optimum talent acquisition. Their tasks include forecasting, sourcing, assessing, hiring and onboarding candidates using technology, key performance indicators and expertise.
Especially useful for IT staffing, RPO services offer:
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- The best candidates from within the talent pool
- Perform referral activation
- Conserve HR resources on sourcing candidates
- Accommodate to most employment situations
- Provide real-team insights for the company to make decisions
- Engage senior leaders in the recruitment process
- Follow labour laws
- Reduce direct advertising
- Maintain detailed talent records all in a short period
4. Build-Operate-Transfer Recruitment Model
The Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model refers to setting up an offshore unit when they ‘build’ the project and putting them through a trial during the ‘operate’ stage. Once you are confident that the team has adapted the company’s methodologies, procedures and technology, you can supervise the team during the ‘transfer’ leg.
Thus, you can try out the team before investing in them for a long-term period. The team is managed by the offshore agency, which reduces company costs and reserves more resources to upskill your employees. It reduces the project building team, is available 24*7, works with the latest technology, and has access to local knowledge, legal entitlement to intellectual property, increased scalability, etc.
Though differences do exist between traditional recruiting and the BOT model, the latter is an effective and accepted form of outsourced IT staffing.
5. Hire-Train-Deploy Recruitment Model
The Hire-Train-Deploy recruitment model is an industry-specific recruitment model where IT agencies deploy employees for specialised projects. The provider understands your company’s business and shortlists candidates as per the job description.
Experts search and filter out relevant candidates, while the mentoring team equips the selected candidates with resources to offer better support. The candidate is further trained to work for a particular organisation, which benefits their skills and corporate needs as well.
A popular method for short-term or long-term IT-based projects, the hire-train-deploy method is cost-effective, adds business value and delivers high-quality results with minimum resource loss.
6. Contract-to-Hire or Contractual Recruitment Model
The contract-to-hire recruitment model is a temporary job position where employees work in a company for a specified period before they commit to full-time work. After the contractual period is over, both the employer and employee decide if they want to work together in the future.
Contractual roles are common in IT, such as in project management, graphic design, marketing, communications and administration.
The contractual recruitment model is great to check the compatibility levels between the company and the candidate and increase job benefits if the partnership works out. They are good for candidates who are interested in a career shift for a long-term position, and those who want to learn new skills.
It is equally good for the employer who can see whether the employee fits in with the company’s values, goals and work culture before a final commitment. Also, it’s great to have mutual connections with different companies even if you don’t end up working together after the contract ends.
New business opportunities can always come up if your candidate starts to work in a similar industry but for a different agency.
7. Reverse Partnering Recruitment Model
Recruitment partnering is where candidates look for the right employer themselves and connect with them directly.
They can contact hiring managers and recruiters on their LinkedIn or social media pages with their CV, and showcase their talents/portfolio on social media. You can find potential candidates contributing to online groups of their interest, which could be part of your industry as well.
If you’re interested in connecting with the candidate, you can meet up over coffee and network over a possible employment opportunity. Though it is time-consuming, labour-intensive and experimental, chances are that you would find the most dedicated and engaged employees like this.
Reverse partnering allows recruitment agencies to transfer their clients’ employees to their own payroll, eventually, redeploying them in other opportunities and for other projects.
In IT staffing, recruitment models are trial-and-error methods and you need to experiment with each of them to see what best fits your enterprise. No matter which method you choose, it must resonate with your company goals and the employee’s career prospects alike.
