A summary of technical recruitment agencies work in the Bay Area. How much do they cost? How do they work? What are the advantages? What are the drawbacks? What technical recruitment agencies exist in the Bay Area?
Technical recruitment agencies act as independent companies that focus solely on hiring for their clients. Different technical recruitment agencies have different focuses. Some will only work on full time placements; others place contractors at their client’s companies. Small startups all the way through major corporations use technical recruitment agencies to help them find and close top talent. This article will focus primarily on agency recruitment for software engineers. Recruitment agencies exist in most industries, such as law, accounting, finance, administration and healthcare.
Traditional tech recruitment agencies normally charge companies between 20-25% of an engineer’s first years salary once an offer is made. This is called a placement fee. If the candidate does not last at the company more than three to twelve months, depending on the agreement, the agency will either have to provide a new candidate that gets hired or return the placement fee. Generally, if the agency does not make a placement at the client company they will not get paid.
Tech recruiters work in different ways, but their primary responsibilities are building relationships with candidates and clients. Some recruiters even sit on site at their client’s office while they recruit, they may have an email address from their client’s company. Most agencies have their own offices that they work from while they recruit and generate new sales leads. Agencies generally store candidate information in an Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) that they can search through and send emails from.
Some agencies will insist on meeting candidates in person before introducing them to a client; most are satisfied with speaking with candidates on the phone before they set them up for an interview with their client. Recruiters at recruiting agencies need to build and maintain relationships with candidates and clients in order to successfully place engineers at tech companies in the Bay Area.
There are many advantages to using recruiting agencies, for both companies and candidates. For companies, using a recruiting agency means the hiring manager or talent team needs to spend less time reaching out to candidates and scheduling interviews. They can leverage the agency recruiter’s industry knowledge of hiring trends and work with them as a consultative partner. For candidates, working with an agency recruiter is a great way to get connected with multiple companies that are actively hiring in your area. They can provide details on salary data, resume feedback and act as a middleman when coordinating and scheduling interviews and negotiating offers.
There are downsides to working with recruiting agencies as well. For companies, a placement through a recruiting agency can be prohibitively expensive. Placing a Software Engineer with a base salary of $115,000, which happens to be the current industry average in SF, will cost the employer $23,000 at a 20% agreement rate ($150,000 x .20). Since agency recruiters work on commission their interests may not always align with what’s best for the candidate. There are many fantastic recruiters in the Bay Area who always put candidate’s interest first, but there are many inexperienced ones as well. Building solid relationships and communicating are paramount when working with any recruiter or talent acquisition professional.
Because of the expensive fees agency recruiters can charge, many startups and tech companies opt to bring hiring in house. This means they hire recruiters directly to be part of their team and work on a base salary. This can be more cost effective as companies do not need to pay fees for every hire they make. There may be some bonuses for in house recruiters, but the idea with bringing hiring in house is to have dedicated team members in charge of talent acquisition and hiring process. Companies can and do still use recruiting agencies even if they have an in house talent team.
Below are all the technical recruiting agencies I could find that have offices in the Bay Area. There are dozens of more agencies that focus on administrative, accounting, healthcare and recruiting for other industries. The below recruiting agencies are mostly focused on tech hiring and hiring for startups. Some tech recruitment agencies have multiple offices in the Bay Area. After the jump is a list of recruitment agencies. For more advanced data discovery please sign in to your Employbl account.
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