How To Hire A Creative Staffing Agency, Creative Recruiter
Updated: May 1, 2022
Businesses the world over are always looking for creative professionals.
These individuals are unique because they can leverage their unique talents and skillset to execute projects that require creativity or technical expertise. Most companies, however, have one unique challenge when looking to hire a creative talent to fill creative roles.
How can businesses land the right talent when they can’t/don’t want to spend that much time needed to sift through loads of resumes or conduct candidate interviews?
This is exactly where a creative recruitment agency brings value to your business.
The global creative economy is vast and any company would need a specialist creative staffing agency to navigate this market to attract the best talent for the right role.
This article highlights what creative staffing solutions entail and why organizations might require these for creative jobs or digital talent needs whether on a freelance or permanent basis.
What is creative staffing or creative recruiting?
Most companies often have creative departments that require professionals with specialized skills and expertise for functions such as marketing, advertising, and design, among others.
So, the special kind of hiring process tailored to attract the best creative talents to these departments and roles is what recruiters refer to as creative staffing or creative recruiting.
Creative staffing is a one-of-a-kind recruitment solution consisting of everything from identifying, attracting, reaching out to candidates, interviewing qualified applicants, and placing creative professionals in creative roles.
What is a creative staffing recruiter?
The creative industry spans marketing, digital, public relations, product design, and advertising agencies, among others. The job of a creative staffing recruiter is to fill roles in this industry and departments with creative professionals and talent.
A creative staffing agency has one job - providing strategic creative staffing solutions for client organizations. This is similar to the work of a conventional recruiter or recruitment agency, but this time, the recruitment is tailored to find employment-seeking creatives in Los Angeles, Nashville, and beyond for freelance gigs, long term assignments, as well as for full time or temporary staffing needs.
For specifics, the job of a creative staffing recruiter includes;
Matching top talents with their dream job.
Managing and executing the client company’s recruitment strategy with creative marketing to fill open roles in creative sectors and departments with the right talent.
Working closely with the recruitment team and hiring managers to develop and support strategies offering the latest insights to attract and engage creative digital candidates and job seekers with the right skills and expertise.
Search and source active and passive candidates through traditional and unconventional channels and strategies to land the right candidates for the job postings.
Providing an engaging and high-touch candidate experience for applicants throughout every step of the hiring process.
Coordinating employee onboarding with employers to help creative professionals ease into their new roles.
How do I hire creative talent?
Solving the creative challenge requires organizations to develop and adopt a strategy to attract top talent with creative marketing and digital recruitment strategies to whatever roles they are seeking to fill. For every organization, the decision is always between handling these needs in-house or outsourcing their creative staffing needs to an experienced creative recruitment agency.
The latter has always been the more preferred option thanks to its time and cost savings advantages as well as the greater probability of landing higher quality hires with the assistance of a highly specialized and experienced third-party recruiting team.
But then, how should organizations go about recruiting creative staffing recruiters to help meet their creative staffing needs? Below are some tips to help;
History and experience:
Lookout for creative staffing agencies with history and experience with the type of creative talents you need. Not only will these ensure you land candidates that are a collaborative fit for your agency with regards to your agency's niche and company culture.
Market knowledge
Identify staffing agencies with the right market and compensation knowledge will serve as your strategic partners and advisors.
Recruitment techniques
Get insight into the details of their recruitment process including their track record of developing creative marketing recruitment campaigns as this can provide insight into what results to expect from such partnerships. Ask how the agency recruits and whether they deploy innovative recruitment methods with out-of-the-box channels.
Employee engagement and retention techniques
Ask questions related to the creative staffing agency’s own techniques for employee engagement and retention. This can help paint an interesting picture of what it would be like to partner with such a firm especially when you’re looking to hire full time talents.
Candidates qualification process
Any recruiting firm will tell you they will search for qualified candidates.
Before you hire a creative recruiting and staffing firm, however, dig beyond the surface with questions aimed at understanding exactly how they qualify candidates during the recruitment process to find the best creative talent.
Additional services offered
To be sure of what to expect, always get details of what is included within the creative staffing services and engagement. What aspects of the hiring process will the company cover? Will they provide workforce management along with the basic staffing solutions? Proper clarity of the nature of the contract/engagement helps avoid needless confusion and misunderstanding.
Creative Talent: Using Recruiting and Staffing Services
To hire creative talent, you need to know where to look. Lots of people will tell you that the answer is simple: go out and find them. But when it comes to hiring creatives, this simplistic solution falls flat. Creative talent is notoriously difficult to find in the first place and even more difficult to retain.
Most recruiting and staffing services will provide creative recruiters who specialize in finding creative talent for companies. Creative recruiters are experts at understanding what it takes to fill a creative position and often have a background in creative fields and industry themselves.
There are various recruiting and staffing services a company can use to hire creative talent. The company must first understand its hiring need. A company that needs freelance or temporary talent for a creative digital project, for example, should work with a staffing agency or recruiting agency to offer on-demand recruitment support with strategic staffing services such as advertising, assessments, and interviews.
As an example, design firms that need full-time employees for various creative roles could target recruitment agencies that offer direct hire recruiting for on-demand recruiting support as job requisitions are initiated or recruitment process outsourcing if there are more positions or niche posts to be filled.
Providers of recruitment process outsourcing, or RPOs, are companies to handle all or part of your recruitment needs.
This includes sourcing, screening, interviewing, and selecting new employees; ongoing monitoring of staff engagement and performance; and even managing employee relations issues. With a recruitment process outsourcing, rpo provider the client can choose from several rpo models ranging from on site, remote, or hybrid recruiting support.
All of these varied recruitment services offer advantages to clients based on the needs of their business.
Conclusion
Creativity and innovation help businesses stand out from the competition as well as get ahead of the game. So, every organization needs creatives to fill essential roles within the company.
Recognizing your business’s need for creative professionals is always a great start.
But clearly understanding how a creative staffing and recruiting agency will bring value to your search in creative and tech hiring for creative directors, digital marketing managers, art directors, web designers, and other creative job roles… that’s when you can become rest assured of success because your business will become almost unstoppable.
Whether you’re looking for experienced design talent for UX designers, digital marketing experts, product designers, user researchers, writers, content managers, and more. A creative staffing and recruiting agency can quickly help you find highly skilled creative professionals with the right talent to fill these roles and help drive your organization towards innovation and the success that comes with it.
When it comes to hiring creative talent, there are a number of options to consider. Hiring through a staffing agency or recruiting firm is a great way to tap into the expertise of a team of professionals who focus on matching talent with the needs of companies and organizations. Recruitment process outsourcing is another great option for companies who need to find creative talent but don’t want to deal with the hard work of doing so. With the right plan in place, you can hire great talent that will boost your business and help your business grow!
Accendi Group recruiting and staffing creative services team of talent attraction recruiting experts help you attract, engage and hire the right person into the right creative roles. Our creative headhunters help you make the best hiring decisions so that your business succeeds.
For more info on how Accendi creative and digital marketing recruiters can assist your organization in navigating an increasingly competitive creative labor market, visit our recruitment services to learn more.