At STEPS Labour & Recruitment we believe in partnering with our clients to provide the most effective and efficient recruitment service for a fair price. We work closely with your management team as an extension of your organisation’s human resource’s function. We provide the competency assessment expertise and utilise our extensive industry networks to find the top candidates with the skills, experience and attitude to suit the role and the best cultural fit for your organisation.
We are not trying to compete with budget fixed price recruitment agencies that rush through the process to make the “sale”, just to get on with the next recruitment assignment so they can make up their numbers.
We recognise that every role and client is unique and finding the right candidate to fill a specific role takes time and effort and cannot always be rushed. Having said that sometimes we may already have the ideal candidate or a few suitable great candidates in our candidate database, minimising the time and cost involved, so we do not think it is fair to charge our clients large placement fees of 15%-20% of the first year’s annual salary like many large generalist recruitment agencies do.
Hence, we have adopted a Pay As You Go Recruitment Model based on a Schedule of rates and reimbursable expenses. For each assignment we apply a minimum fee consisting of an overhead cost component (to ensure we can keep the lights on!) and a minimum expected number of labour hours to manage the recruitment process. We endeavour to work within this minimum fee budget whenever possible, but recognise that sometimes hard to fill roles with specific requirements may take more time and effort to find the right candidates to present to the client. Likewise, roles that attract a large quantity of applicants can take longer to complete the vetting process to find those hidden gems. Given this variability in the recruitment process we think it is only fair that we are rewarded for our time and effort on behalf of our clients, so we charge our time by the hour.
The Pay As You Go Recruitment Model can result in minimum fees as low as $3,000 + GST compared to a typical placement fee of more than $10,000 from many other recruitment agencies for the same role, so the savings to our clients can be substantial, without sacrificing the quality of service received.
On the other hand we recognise that our clients need certainty when it comes to the cost involved in engaging recruitment services, so we always provide our clients with a maximum fee (or not to exceed estimate), so they can be assured that the final cost will never be excessive.
If a client requests we can alternatively provide a fixed price fee so they have absolute certainty of their costs.
Each client is unique and some may wish to be more directly involved in the recruitment process than others. To cater for this variability we offer both complete and unbundled recruitment services and set the minimum and maximum (or fixed) fees according to what level of service each client requires at the outset. Of course the Pay As You Go Recruitment Model provides maximum flexibility anyway so if the client decides they want to be more involved in the recruitment process and that saves us time and money that saving will be passed on to the client.