Finding top talent for your open positions has always been challenging, and local aerospace companies are finding it even more difficult in recent years. Aerospace recruitment agencies in Wichita can act as reliable partners to get your company the needed talent.
Why Choosing the Right Recruitment Agency Matters?
You could do it alone when bringing in skilled, effective new employees. However, aerospace staffing companies specialize in talent acquisition for the industry. This allows them to offer several benefits that aerospace companies have difficulty realizing independently.
First and foremost, working with an aerospace recruitment agency in Wichita will save you time. According to a recent report from SHRM, the average time to fill open roles is more than 47 days, with manufacturing industries typically taking longer than average. If your company takes too long to hire promising candidates, it is probably losing out on top talent that gets lured away during the hiring process.
Top aerospace recruiters maintain a pool of industry talent that they can tap into for their clients. Rather than posting to a job board and waiting for resumes to flood in, recruiters at an aerospace staffing company simply make a few phone calls and send out a few emails to candidates with whom they already have a relationship.
These candidates have already been vetted for both their technical hard skills and interpersonal soft skills. Therefore, they fit much better than random people applying off the street. The result is a much better chance that new hires will stick with your company for many years than bad-fit candidates who flame out after a handful of months.
Top aerospace recruiters also know the industry’s labor pool inside and out. They understand how to fill high-demand positions that require particular skill sets. They can also use their industry knowledge to speak the same language as candidates, making them feel heard and understood. This can give your company an edge in landing the best candidates for critical specialized or leadership positions.
To be clear, recruitment agencies do charge fees for their services. However, the benefits they provide in return make these fees seem modest by comparison.
5 Steps to Selecting the Best Aerospace Recruitment Agency in Wichita
All aerospace staffing companies aren’t created equal. Some provide knowledgeable, custom services to their clients, while others take a one-size-fits-all approach and focus on quantity, not quality.
Therefore, your company must be highly selective when working with an aerospace recruitment agency in Wichita. Consider the following five steps to choosing the best talent acquisition partner.
Identify Specific Roles and Skills Required
You wouldn’t be reading this blog post if your company didn’t need aerospace talent. But there’s a big difference between recognizing the need for talent and having a tactical understanding of your talent needs.
The first step to choosing an aerospace recruitment agency in Wichita is to figure out exactly what you need and how to meet that need. Determine the number of open positions you need to fill and whether those positions should be filled with permanent or temporary staff members. You also might want to consider hiring some positions on a temp-to-hire basis, which allows you to test out promising candidates temporarily before making them an offer of full-time employment. If you have seasonal or project work, you should focus on a temporary staffing solution that helps you meet increases in workload. Determining whether you need to hire full-time employees or temporary workers can impact the agency you work with because some agencies are more focused on one or the other type of talent acquisition.
Determining if you need to fill or add executive-level positions is also important. If so, you should look for top aerospace recruiters with a track record of hiring for senior-level positions. The hiring process for these positions is far more complicated because the stakes are high, and you want a recruiter with experience.
Evaluate Internal Recruitment Capabilities
Once you have a sense of your specific talent needs and strategy, you must determine your company’s ability to meet those needs.
Every talent acquisition process takes time, even for filling low-level positions. Your HR department and hiring managers must dedicate time to marketing, screening, interviewing, and negotiating offers. If your staff members don’t have time to handle all these processes, it makes more sense to outsource them to an aerospace staffing company. Talk with your company’s internal stakeholders to get a strong sense of what your company can handle.
Reviewing your talent acquisition capabilities lets you converse more with potential staffing partners. Your internal staff may be better positioned to write job descriptions, while it might make more sense to have a staffing partner negotiate salaries, for example. Hashing out where your capabilities end and where an agency’s can begin makes you better suited to finding the right partner and building a highly productive relationship with that partner.
Explore Industry Knowledge and Expertise of the Staffing and Recruitment Company
Choosing a particular aerospace staffing company based on its brand or personal connection may be tempting. However, you don’t want to fall into the trap of choosing an agency based on superficial information. Also, an agency’s services might work great for other companies but not yours.
With your talent needs and internal capabilities in mind, identify several top recruitment agencies and contact them. Ask questions about their collaborative hiring processes and their approach to meeting your talent needs. But don’t just take their word for it. Be sure to ask for references and case studies that you can review. Top aerospace recruiters should be happy to share their success stories and connect you to happy clients. If a recruiter is hesitant to provide references or case studies, you may want to consider looking elsewhere.
While it isn’t necessary, you may want to look up an agency and its recruiters online. Employer review sites like Glassdoor will let you know if people are generally happy to work for the company and what criticisms they have. Looking up recruiters on LinkedIn can give you a sense of how passionate they are about their work and how active they are in trying to connect with other people in the local aerospace industry.
Consider the Agency’s Reputation and Review Client Testimonials
You’ve probably made a lot of connections in the local aerospace industry, and those connections can be very valuable when choosing the best aerospace recruitment agency in Wichita.
Reach out to others in the industry and ask if they’ve heard anything about the agencies you’re considering. Get specific information on time-to-fill, retention rate, and hire ratio. If Agency X took a long time to fill new positions and communication wasn’t great, you may want to move on to another agency.
Also, google the names of companies you are considering to see if they’ve won any awards or public praise. While you shouldn’t base your selection solely on public recognition, seeing a company win awards could back up what you’ve heard about them through your network or put what you’ve heard into a different context.
Compare Cost and Value
Nothing comes for free, and that includes top aerospace recruiters. If your company will invest in an aerospace recruitment agency in Wichita, you need to ensure you will get a significant return on that investment.
Ask prospective agencies how they attract clients for the services they provide. Typically, an aerospace staffing company charges differently based on its services. For example, temporary staffing services might be billed as a percentage of workers’ hourly pay rate, while executive recruitment services might be billed per hour.
Once you understand what each agency charges for its services, you can compare these fees to your budget. It’s also important to consider the return provided by new or temporary hires. For example, bringing in temporary workers might allow you to fulfill a lucrative contract that more than compensates for agency fees.
Struggling to Choose the Perfect Staffing and Recruiting Agency? Select Top Notch Personnel: Wichita’s Premier Aerospace Recruitment Partner
At Top Notch Personnel, we have deep roots in the local aviation industry and a large pool of aerospace talent. We take pride in making recruitment easier and faster for our clients. If you want to try us, head to our Request an Employee page, and we can find your company’s best local aerospace talent.