As the world reopens, more and more organisations are finding themselves on the hunt for new staff, particularly for customer-facing roles. The job market, however, is particularly saturated.

There are 3 main ways to recruit new staff - recruiting through an agency, self-advertised recruitment, and recruiting through an apprenticeship.

But which method would be best for your organisation? 

Recruiting Through an Agency

When you use a recruitment agency, they do the hard work for you - they advertise the job vacancy, sift through applicants’ CVs, and then put forward suitable candidates for interviews.

Whilst this does take a lot of work off your HR department’s plate, recruiting through an agency does have its disadvantages.

With recruitment agencies taking between 10-30% of the role’s base salary as a lump sum, it can be an extremely expensive route to go down. Not only is it expensive, but the quality of candidates produced may not always be to your organisation’s standards or expectations. 

Self-advertised Recruitment

If recruiting through an agency isn’t the path you want to go down, another option is self-advertised recruitment where you do all of the work internally.

By doing all of the work like creating the job spec and going through CVs yourself, you can save a lot of money that would otherwise be paid to the agency.  However, not only can advertising on sites such as Indeed and Monster get expensive, it is also extremely time-consuming. In the current climate, there are millions of people looking for and applying to jobs - particularly entry-level roles like customer service staff. This means that there will likely be a mountain of CVs that need looking through; this way, recruitment quickly becomes a full-time job.

Whilst putting in this amount of time and effort can be beneficial when recruiting for high-level specialist roles that require a lot of skills and prior experience, it may not always be necessary for junior roles. Monster and Indeed are also unlikely to have high grade/specialised candidates.

Recruiting Through an Apprenticeship

Whilst both of the above methods of recruitment do work, the type of candidate that organisations really want are unlikely to be in the pool of people that are currently job searching - outstanding candidates are hard to come by in this competitive market so it can be a good idea to look outside-the-box and consider a different way of recruiting, like recruiting through an apprenticeship.

Recruiting through an apprenticeship has countless benefits, including:

• Time
  As with an agency, recruiting through an apprenticeship saves you a lot of time and resources as the vacancy is advertised and CVs are looked at for you, but without the extortionate agency fee.
  
  
• Money
  Not only do you save money on agency fees, the programme is also 95% funded, saving you even more money on training. In addition to the money saved, there is also a £3,000 government grant for organisations that hire an apprentice. Apprenticeships are particularly good for entry-level roles like customer service as they typically attract younger applicants - younger hires = bigger grants.
  
  
• Retention
  The candidate’s job is tied to the 15-month apprenticeship programme, meaning they are likely to stay with your organisation for a long time - this will likely help reduce your staff turnover in the long run.
  
  
• Return On Investment
  Because of the comprehensive training that the apprenticeship encompasses, learners will pick up new knowledge, skills, and abilities quickly, giving you an almost immediate ROI.

As well as this, the type of candidate that would apply for an apprenticeship is exactly the type of employee that organisations should look to hire. From our extensive experience, we have found apprentices are typically already in a learning, progressive mindset and their willingness to commit to a long term development programme is a tell-tale sign that they will take the job seriously and strive to excel in their role. Being given this development opportunity is not only likely to increase their performance and productivity, but also their job satisfaction as it gives them a chance to shine, and achieve their full potential.

Being responsible for both the recruitment process and the training itself allows us to get to know the learner(s) and understand where they currently are in their career and where they want to get to. This enables us to better support them and ensure that they walk away from the programme with all of the skills and abilities required of an exceptional customer service representative. Recruiting through an apprenticeship is a tried and tested method, proven to work for many different businesses in many different industries. We have helped lots of organisations hire apprentices and they have seen nothing but fantastic results and great success.

By going down the route of recruiting an apprentice, you reduce recruitment costs, reduce time spent finding candidates, get a financial boost from the government, and ultimately gain a high-achieving employee with long term prospects.

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Our Funded Customer Service Specialist Apprenticeship Programme

Our Customer Service Specialist Apprenticeship has been designed by industry for industry, ensuring that all of the knowledge, skills, and best practices taught in the programme are up-to-date, relevant, and easily applicable to the workplace.

Over 15 months, the programme teaches learners all of the fundamentals of providing outstanding customer service, including how to drive loyalty, retention and satisfaction, how to resolve complex customer issues and requests, and how to continuously improve customer service at your organisation to deliver an unrivalled customer experience, helping your organisation stand out from the rest.

This programme is also 95% funded by the ESFA, meaning that employers only need to pay a 5% contribution towards the cost of the programme, allowing you to develop an exceptional, skilled, competent customer service representative for a fraction of the usual cost.

How to Recruit an Apprentice

While recruiting an apprentice may seem complex at first glance, it is a relatively simple process that can be done in 10 simple steps. You can click here to download our quick step-by-step guide to recruiting an apprentice.

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Next on the Daily Dot, we will be looking at how you can supercharge your sales team’s knowledge with a funded, expert training programme.

Until next time...