Tech Recruitment Manager Richard Riddett sat down with Trevor Murray recently to chat about Schwarz & Vogel’s innovative new Recruitment As A Service solution that is dramatically reducing agency fee costs for companies while also saving in-house recruiters the need to pre-screen prospective candidates.
Schwarz & Vogel will be five years in operation come July, so they have plenty to be proud of after half a decade in existence. In the meantime, their client companies will be the ones celebrating because they have saved time and money by using Schwarz & Vogel’s outside-the-box recruitment process.
Right now, the PorterShed understands that Schwarz & Vogel are the only recruitment firm in the world that uses the RaaS model – allowing them to work directly for, and with, companies to help source the right type of candidates across a multitude of industries in a unique way.
The idea behind their alternative recruitment model was to make change happen in the industry, creating a profitable, fair, and efficient system that provides clients with quality candidates – and, ultimately, hires. From a traditional standpoint, Schwarz & Vogel have proven that many recruitment agencies can charge up to a whopping 1300 percent margin. They decided that there must be a more useful and cheaper way to deliver recruitment services.
“There’s no change if there’s no change. Schwarz & Vogel looked at it and figured there has to be an easier way, a better way, and this was it. Why not move to a consultancy bill-by-the-hour model which is way more cost-effective?”
Essentially, the recruitment specialists take care of the pre-screen process whereby their recruiters ask a series of questions (tailored by the hiring company) to candidates in a recorded video process (known as a V-Screen or virtual screen). That video and the candidates’ CVs are then passed along to each hiring company to decide who makes it to the first-round interview. Schwarz & Vogel charge an hourly rate which works out much cheaper than recruitment agencies that charge a percentage of a successful hire’s annual salary.
“The hiring team can view those V-Screens on the go whenever they have time. So, instead of organizing your hiring team to do a face-to-face pre-screen, we’re doing that. We give the client a CV and a video and the client can watch it whenever they want, which means they can spend time on first-round interviews, rather than spending time on pre-screens,” Richard explains.
The client has access to the RaaS platform, giving them visibility on what’s being done and how long it’s taking.
“The client can go in and have a look at their recruitment spend at any point in the process,” Richard explains.
“So, we’ll label everything that we’ve done, we’ll associate the time and the cost, and then when they hire, we just click ‘invoice’ and it goes straight to the client…as far as we can tell, there’s no-one else doing it this way.”
For two of the company’s five years, Richard has been based out of the PorterShed, giving Richard access to some of Galway’s leading tech experts. Indeed, Richard himself has 20 years of experience in tech, so he has the knowledge and insight necessary to effectively screen tech candidates.
“That’s one of the unique things about us. We have actual industry experience, so when I ask those tech questions to highly skilled people, I understand what they’re saying, especially for Director and C-Level positions, it’s no issue”.
“The majority of our candidates will get through because I know what I’m reading when I’m looking at CVs,” Richard explains.
Looking at the infographic here, we can clearly see that Schwarz & Vogel’s strategy is paying dividends for their clients.
One of their top clients has had 15 people hired thanks to Schwarz and Vogel’s RaaS solution. They completed 269 hours of recruitment, saving the company €163,473 in the process. Clearly, the benefits are there to see.
Schwarz & Vogel are actively working with a number of Galway-based companies to help source candidates for a range of roles, and they have been doing so for a number of years. What’s more, they are an international operation, so they are working across not only Ireland but also the UK, the Channel Islands and Canada.
Richard gives another example as to how effective Schwarz and Vogel’s RaaS solution has been for companies. One of their Canadian clients had been searching for two highly skilled technical SEO specialists. They had been working on these roles with a local recruitment agency for 12 months without a hire. They turned to Schwarz & Vogel to try and turn the tide and secure the highly skilled people they needed.
“I found them two people within a month,” Richard explained.
“It took me 19 hours and 40 minutes to find two highly skilled Technical SEO Specialists. In the process they saved CA$25,000. So, that gives you an idea of the value RaaS from Schwarz & Vogel delivers.”
Choosing Schwarz and Vogel means that the costs will surely go down, while the advantages of using the RaaS model keep adding up. What’s more, not having to pay so much on recruitment fees means that not only do clients need to pay less to hire candidates, but it opens up the possibility of being able to hire more people with the money that’s saved – and it comes with an added positive, too.
“For a company that needs to hire two Java developers by using an old traditional agency, you can add between 30-50k on top of that for recruitment fees. Well, if you move to our model, maybe you can hire three developers instead of two?”
With five years already behind them, Schwarz and Vogel are continuing to look to the future – one where companies have the option of finding new hires in a seamless, cost-effective way.
If you think RaaS from Schwarz & Vogel could benefit your business, why not book some time with Richard to talk about your recruitment needs by booking some time here.
For more information on switching to Recruitment as a Service, visit their site below.
By Trevor Murray
Content Marketing Specialist at the PorterShed
Email: trevor@portershed.com | LinkedIn | Twitter
