Recruiting the top talent you need in your company is far from easy; this is why many companies, from small businesses to big Fortune 500s, will utilize outside recruitment firms to find great candidates.

While giving tasks to outside recruitment teams and agencies can make your life a little simpler, it also brings with it a host of other challenges.

Chief among those challenges is the need for controlled access, security and privacy. Even if your company has unlimited resources, it is unlikely you will use an outside recruiting team to hire for every position. Which means when your new team comes on to help your recruiting efforts, they will need access to your existing recruitment software and applicant tracking system.

This can cause some problems for privacy-minded companies, when proper access control cannot be administered. You need your new recruiting team to help, that is why you brought them on after all, but you want to make sure they only have access to a specific set of open positions and the related candidates. This is true when dealing with your internal recruiting team as well. Using an applicant tracking system like Simplicant, you can assign different levels of access control to your outside recruiters as well as your internal team.

You do not want to compromise the integrity of your internal hiring process by making confidential information available to those who should not have access. In addition, it also helps in keeping things better organized when people can simply focus on the tasks assigned to them.

So what is the solution? Here are a few ways to secure and control the access to your recruitment software, get the most out of your outside recruiting team, and still find the best candidates:

Control access to your recruitment software

You know an outside team will need access to your applicant tracking system in order to find and sort the best candidates for your open positions. However, you want to ensure this team is only focusing on the job or jobs you want them to hire for. What your organization needs is an applicant tracking system with built-in controls, so you can maintain privacy without giving up the benefits of bringing in outside recruitment help.

By controlling access to your recruitment software, you can limit the involvement of outsiders in your system. Restrict the access to only the jobs you need filled by the outside recruiting team, so there are no privacy concerns. You do not want outside consultants or for that matter any other internal staff that may not be concerned with the hiring of certain positions to have access to confidential content related to the recruitment processing for those positions.

Therefore, keeping tight controls on what can and cannot be seen by outside agencies or any other staff who should not have access is a much needed functionality.

Create a hiring team

If you have multiple people who suddenly need access to your applicant tracking system, you might be even more concerned about privacy. This is why it is smart to create a hiring team and restrict this team's access to only the positions you need help filling.

Building a hiring team for outside recruitment agencies is a smart way to facilitate collaboration, even when you are not directly in charge of the team. And you know better collaboration also means better hires sure to bring real ROI to your company.

Assign a hiring coordinator

Now that you have built a recruitment team and restricted access to your applicant tracking system, it is time to think a bit about candidate experience. The best candidates are not looking to be contacted by multiple people on a recruitment team. You want the hiring process to be as smooth and confusion-free as possible for your top talent. This is why you should assign a hiring coordinator to act as the head of your already-established team.

This recruitment coordinator will do all the communication with top talent, thus cutting down on the clutter for candidates. There might be plenty of people using your applicant tracking system to isolate great talent. But you should make sure you have designated one point-of-contact person on the team to communicate with candidates. This will make the process faster and leaner for both recruitment teams and smart candidates.

Protecting the privacy of your recruitment software is important, but so is finding the talent your company needs to thrive. This is why you should use recruitment software with built-in controls, so you can utilize outside help while still keeping important information inside company walls.

What are some ways you protect privacy while using outside recruitment agencies? Share in the comments!

Sajjad Masud is Co-founder & CEO of Simplicant, a cloud-based recruiting platform transforming the talent acquisition market and making enterprise-level recruiting technology accessible to companies of all sizes. Simplicant's collaborative platform includes social recruiting and redefined candidate relationship management to help organizations optimize their cost and time per hire.

This article was originally published on the Simplicant blog at www.simplicant.com