Robert Half Review: Is Robert Half Worth It for Hiring?
Jason Quey
Updated:
February 15, 2024
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For many businesses, the biggest obstacle to success is hiring great help. Almost one in four small businesses blame the company's failures on not having the right team in place to succeed.
But what can you do to ensure that you have the right team behind you? With limited time and resources for hiring, how can you ensure that your business doesn’t join the funeral march of other firms that couldn’t manage to assemble their all-star team?
This is where a staffing company like Robert Half come in. Today, we’re going to take a closer look at this incredibly popular staffing agency in our Robert Half review. Could they be the magic bullet to all your staffing woes? Read on and find out.
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Since 1948, Robert Half International (RHI) has been matching job seekers and skilled professionals with many of the world's top businesses. Unlike hiring on LinkedIn, a staffing firm like RHI will find the right employee to match your work environment and create a better work/life balance.
Today, the company offers a variety of specialized staffing and consulting services for a multitude of industries. A truly global enterprise, Robert Half has over 400 locations around the world. Although they will help you find employees nearby, since the COVID pandemic, Robert Half could find a qualified person in San Francisco, Denver, or Dallas. Or even someone outside the United States in a country like Uganda.
All that hard work has paid off as Robert Half was named by Forbes’ Magazine as 2019’s top recruiting firm.
For staffing, Robert Half maintains a network of talented professionals across a wide variety of industries, including job titles like:
Robert Half can provide your business with on-site and remote employees with the specialized skill set you’re looking for. With such an extensive network of potential candidates, they can fill many roles on an immediate basis. The company is also quite flexible, allowing you to hire employees for as little as one day or as long as you need.
Robert Half’s capable team of qualified professionals is over one million strong, and every two minutes, a new position is filled by one of these staffers.
When you’re ready to have your position filled, contact a hiring specialist to discuss your unique needs. Most businesses use the contact form on their website so a hiring manager can learn a bit more about their business and what it needs. With over 325 staffing locations across the world, it’s also possible to stop into an office and speak with a staffing coordinator directly.
The Robert Half website also offers a comprehensive candidate search function that allows companies to search their expansive candidate pool. That way, you can create a shortlist of qualified candidates that make it even easier for Robert Half to match you with the ideal candidate for your position.
With over 70 years of experience in the staffing space, Robert Half has amassed quite a following with top companies. In addition to being voted Forbes’ top staffing agency in 2019, they were also voted one of Fortune’s Most Admired Companies for 2020.
One of the major pros of working with a staffing agency is the flexibility it provides. While plenty of massive companies rely on Robert Half to fill positions, it’s the small and mid-sized businesses that can best leverage the additional flexibility Robert Half can offer.
On an interim basis, a staffing agency allows you to provide reinforcements during your busy season, or to cover for a full-time employee that’s currently on medical or family leave.
Robert Half can also enable you to fill permanent positions without having to commit to the hiring process. With a temp-to-full-time arrangement, your business can garner meaningful insight about a person’s skills and personality before you commit to bringing them onto the team permanently. If it isn’t a good fit, you can move on and find a more suitable candidate.
This raises an essential factor that’s worth discussing: for every lousy hire a great company makes, they can expect the cost of that hire to come in somewhere around 30% of that bad hire’s first-year salary. Hire a few bad employees, and those losses can add up very quickly. Further, the Harvard Business Review estimates that as much as 80% of employee turnover is the result of bad hires.
Even with entry-level positions, the cost of a bad hire can quickly run into the five-figure range. For small and mid-sized businesses, these types of losses can prove crippling to your business.
There are also risks you run if you wait too long to let go of an employee who doesn’t measure up. In many cases, the standout members of your team are forced to pick up the slack and shoulder the weight of problem hires. Before you know it, your top employees are burning out, and instead of needing to replace one problem employee, you have to restaff your whole team.
These problems can be further exacerbated if the bad hire you’ve made is in an executive role within your firm. Not only will it take time and money to replace them, but you’ll also need to break any bad habits your team may have picked up from them along the way.
When you allow Robert Half to staff your open positions, you eliminate virtually all the risks associated with hiring a full-time employee. If the person doesn’t work out, you can move on without ever assuming any of the costs associated with hiring and training. Robert Half instead replaces that headache with a knowledgeable professional who can jump right into your project.
Another massive benefit of working with Robert Half is that they can quickly scale with your business. Staffing an entirely new team from Robert Half is just as easy as staffing a single employee.
With Robert Half, all employees are put through a rigorous screening process and technical proficiency exam. These standards ensure that your recruiter is only pulling from top-quality talent that can jump right into a productive role for your business.
Perhaps the most significant benefit to working with Robert Half is that they’re as adept at placing employees inside your office as they are finding you talented remote employees. Considering the tumultuous business environment of 2020, this is a huge plus. Plus, if employees aren’t tethered to a physical location, you can widen the talent pool.
It’s worth mentioning that Robert Half is also an industry leader in terms of corporate responsibility. The company engages in global philanthropic, sustainability, and diversity efforts. In 2020, Robert Half was named to Baron’s 100 Most Sustainable Companies list for a third time, along with being honored by Forbes as one of the Best Employers for Diversity.
Robert Half also maintains a vast collection of educational materials and courses for their employees, and they have development programs that connect their strongest employees with growth opportunities.
As the most popular staffing agency in the world, Robert Half has its fair share of glowing reviews from actual clients. Here’s a sample of what some hiring managers have to say about their experience dealing with Robert Half.
Others recommend Robert Half specifically for hard to fill IT roles, and for providing flexibility and well-vetted candidates that were perfect for the task at hand.
Of course, that isn’t to say that Robert Half is an entirely perfect entity. There are a few things that the staffing giant could stand to improve.
While most companies come away with a wonderful experience after dealing with Robert Half, there are a few ways that the service could be better. It’s worth noting that these issues aren’t unique to Robert Half, but instead they’re complaints that are common among all staffing agencies.
When hiring any employee, there’s the possibility that they won’t mesh well with your team. This concern is exasperated by the nature of temp work. As a temp, it’s challenging to feel like part of the group, or that the work you’re doing is especially significant.
The best way to avoid this issue is to cultivate an inclusive workplace culture, where temp employees are treated as valuable members of the organization.
Another issue with staffing agencies is that you have to cede a level of control to your recruiter. Your business is important to you, and it’s hard to hand the reins to a third party that may not understand your needs as well as you do.
Some clients found that the quality of candidate that Robert Half was providing initially wasn’t up to the level the client demanded. It sounds like it may take some time for your recruiter to truly understand your needs.
It seems that the most common issue people have when working with Robert Half isn’t the quality of their services, but the price. As the leader in the staffing industry, it’s easy to understand why Robert Half is more expensive than other staffers. Depending on the project you’re hiring for, you may find that it’s easier or cheaper to hire someone on your own, or find a freelancer.
Check out our list of Robert Half alternatives.
It’s difficult to pin down Robert Half’s fee structure because the fees they charge are fluid depending on the type of position you’re filling, and the length of time you need the employee.
For temporary hires, you can expect to pay about 175% of what you would pay the employee if you hired them on your own and put them on your payroll. This cost covers both the temp employee’s compensation and benefits, as well as the agency’s fee.
For example, if you’re filling a temporary position with an employee who makes $19.50 an hour, the billable cost from Robert Half will be around $34.25.
Should you decide to hire your temp employee on a full-time basis, you’ll also have to pay a recruitment fee to Robert Half. This fee varies widely depending on the industry you’re hiring for and the salary of the employee. Generally, these fees work out to around 33% of the employee’s first-year salary.
Compared to other staffing agencies, Robert Half’s fees are usually higher. While their recruit fees are relatively standard for the industry, many staffing agencies have an hourly wage markup around 50-60%.
It’s worth noting that while Robert Half is more expensive than a number of their competitors, they are the industry leader when it comes to staffing. Robert Half has a proven track record of success thanks to their incredibly large pool of talented candidates.
While their fees may be higher than competitors, the cost of using Robert Half is often lower than the competition because they make it easy to find the right candidate the first time.
So much of your business’ success depends on the team you surround yourself with. 23% of failed startup businesses blame their failures on their inability to assemble the right team. This problem isn’t unique, and it’s something that every business owner must grapple with to realize success.
Meanwhile, hiring is difficult, and finding the perfect candidate takes a great deal of time and energy. Robert Half allows businesses to outsource the hiring process so they can focus their energy on taking their business to the next level.
While Robert Half is on the expensive side compared to other staffing agencies, they have a proven track record of excellence. If you’re looking for top-quality candidates that may be able to grow into a significant role within your business, you’ll want to make Robert Half the first phone call for your staffing needs.