Have you considered hiring a staffing agency to recruit and vet new hires for your small business?

Staffing agencies are not only available to Fortune 500 companies — small businesses can benefit from them as well. More importantly, there are a number of ways that staffing agencies can assist small business owners in hiring the right talent. Essentially a staffing agency can act as an extension of your existing human resources department. If you are a scrappy startup or micro business, that HR department is usually you.

Outsourcing HR Tasks to Staffing Agencies

Outsourcing your hiring practices can provide a tremendous boost to your productivity and sanity.

Hiring new employees can be overwhelming. However, it is important to keep constant tabs on your staffing needs and the critical positions that need to be filled. Often a new hire does not bring immediate monetary return to small businesses, so it is important to correctly forecast necessary labor costs based on sales projections.

While working with a staffing agency comes with additional overhead costs, in contrast hiring the wrong person can have a lasting impact on company morale, productivity and your bottom line.

Here are a few ways staffing agencies can take the headache out of small business hiring:

1. Find Employees with Specific Talent

While you probably know your industry very well, it may be difficult to understand some of the niche roles that are needed within your company. If you’re not a writer or a designer, you may not know how to attract the right professional to your team.

Staffing agencies can help you identify, qualify and contact talented individuals you may not know how to find independently. A staffing agency can also help you identify candidates and check references of prospective job candidates.

2. Reduce the Cost of Bad Hires

Staffing agencies do represent an added labor cost once you contract their services. However working with a staffing agency could represent a long-term quality decision. For instance, using a staffing agency can drastically reduce your chances of making the wrong hire. The Department of Labor estimates the cost of replacing a single employee to be one-third of their salary. Additionally, hiring the wrong employee and fixing the mistake within 6 months can cost as much as 2.5 times the person’s salary. Even at $40,000 a year, that is a $120,000 mistake — including their salary. Why not do it right the first time, instead?

3. Free Up Your Time

Hiring the wrong people doesn’t only impact labor costs. Hiring a new employee is a significant investment of time, effort and resources to post a job, screen applicants, interview and then train them. As a small business, with limited resources it is an investment that you should not, and frankly, cannot afford to take lightly.

For example, once you recognize a need for in-house IT services to keep your data and network secure how do you find the best talent, in the shortest amount of time at a cost-effective rate?

This task becomes even harder if you do not know the first thing about recruiting, vetting and hiring tech support. Interviewing multiple job candidates can become an arduous process that takes weeks and can distract you from growing your company.

Working with a company that specializes in technology staffing may be the next logical step. That way, you have saved valuable time better spent on more important things – namely, running your business.

4. Benefit from a Motivated Job Search

Let’s face it: There are a number of tasks that you would prefer to do instead of combing through resumes and applications searching for the right hire. Many small business owners take on this task and end up dragging out the process, costing themselves more money as they struggle without the proper staff in place.

Since you are paying a staffing agency to find the right employees, they will not suffer from a lack of motivation or time. Moreover, since staffing agencies can only compete on their reputations, they have become skilled at eliminating unqualified job candidates.

How do you currently recruit, vet and hire new employees? Let me know in the comments section below.

Erin Everhart is the director of web marketing at 352 Media Group, a custom web development and digital marketing company.

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