If you have ever logged onto LinkedIn, you have likely encountered a massive number of ZipRecruiter ads. Between 2021 and 2022, ZipRecruiter spent a reported $19.2 million on advertisements on LinkedIn alone. This was a quadrupling of their advertising spending compared to the twelve months before. While the company certainly wants you to know its name, this does not mean that they are the ideal solution for your staffing needs. Along with Indeed.com, ZipRecruiter makes the promise that they will help you find the candidates that you need to fulfill your job roles. In reality, you are likely to find far more success when using a traditional staffing agency.
ZipRecruiter Fails Business Owners
There are several things to pick at when it comes to ZipRecruiter. Despite the shine that it attempts to put on itself via its heavy advertising budget, there are several pitfalls to using ZipRecruiter to try to fill your roles.
They Only Offer Monthly Subscriptions
Small business owners might not need to constantly fill new roles. They are likely to only need to put a job posting up from time to time. ZipRecruiter does not make this easy for them. The problem is that ZipRecruiter does NOT have a free option for users at all. Instead, you are roped into paying a monthly subscription fee to ZipRecruiter month after month for a service that you might not use regularly at all. They only offer a 4-day free trial. This is hardly enough to investigate the entire platform and then you must start paying the monthly subscription fee. Worse yet, that monthly fee comes in at a steep price tag of $299. That is just the starter plan!
A Flood of Applicants
At first blush, it sounds ideal to have a huge number of applicants for a job role you are attempting to fulfill. However, there may be too many applicants for a role. This can make it hard to sort out the contenders from the pretenders. ZipRecruiter and Indeed fail at this. They provide you with a stack of applicants, but they do not make it easy to figure out who is for real. Crazyegg.com reports on the disaster that is the ZipRecruiter user dashboard:
Although the ZipRecruiter dashboard and its navigation are simple to figure out, sorting applicants isn’t so smooth. When you receive applicants from multiple job postings, they all end up in your dashboard, waiting for you to sort them. Depending on how many jobs you have on the platform, this can quickly overwhelm your dashboard.
Don’t get yourself into that mess if you can avoid it.
No Screening of Candidates
What good is a staffing service provider if they don’t both sort out any of the candidates for you? Sadly, that is exactly what you get with ZipRecruiter. They simply drop a pile of applicants in your lap without any screening whatsoever. Therefore, you have to sort through an incredible number of applications to find those that are seriously interested in the position that you have open. Not only that, but you might have to spend valuable time on people who never should have applied to your job in the first place. Even worse than that, if someone gets through all of that, you might end up with a less-than-stellar employee working for you.
Traditional Staffing Agencies Are the Way to Go
The process of hiring someone is a process that takes a significant amount of time. You have to take on the following processes to obtain a new employee:
- Reviewing Applications. You have to make an initial assessment of a potential candidate based on how their credentials appear on paper.
- Interview Candidates. Sitting down with potential candidates one-on-one is the best way to get to know who they are as a person. This is also a great opportunity for the candidate to ask questions of you and for you to ask questions of them. This is a feeling-out process that must occur to help ensure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to working at this job.
- Negotiate Salaries and Benefits. A negotiation process is necessary to determine one’s salary and benefits.
All of these steps are time-consuming and labor-intensive. That is exactly why so many companies reach out to the experts that work for staffing agencies. Business News Daily explains that staffing agencies act as a middleman between companies and prospective candidates. They help find the candidates who are looking for work and pair them up with the companies that need their labor. Best of all, traditional staffing agencies take care of the very parts of the process that ZipRecruiter and Indeed fail to.
The traditional staffing agency will vet candidates for you before presenting anyone to you. If they don’t feel that a candidate is a good role for your role, you will never hear about that candidate. The staffing agency will sort this all out for you. They will make sure you don’t deal with stacks and stacks of applications.
Their Compensation Is Aligned With Your Success
ZipRecruiter and Indeed will gladly charge you month after month regardless of the level of success or failure you experience on the platform. Traditional staffing agencies have a different model that they stick to. They will charge you based on the salary of the employee that you hire. The rates range from 25% to 100% of the hourly rate paid to the employee. What this means is that you are only paying the staffing agency when they find candidates successful enough that you hire them and begin paying them. Thus, the agencies have a vested interest in making sure you get candidates who are truly useful for your role.
There are a lot of reasons to look at going with a traditional staffing agency instead of ZipRecruiter or Indeed. Stop throwing your money out the window on these services that overpromise and underdeliver. Instead, go with a traditional staffing agency. For more details on why you should make the switch, please contact us today to get the latest details.