Get the Most Out of Agency Recruiting
So you have all these req’s, next to no candidates and way too many needy hiring managers. Time to bring in the cavalry and scour the land for every last drop of talent. If you are like most internal recruiters or HR professionals, this means partnering with agencies and search firms.
One of the biggest complaints from internal recruiters and hiring managers is the quality of candidates.
Are you setting clear baseline requirements with your agency recruiter or representative? Express in direct terms that candidates must have A and B or they are not a fit. Create some dialogue around flexibility on the ideal candidate profile as well. Explain how a candidate with A, not B, but is really good at C, may be a fit and why. Giving clear requirements, in addition to what you’re willing to consider outside of those competencies, creates an accurate success profile for the recruiter to run with.
After scouring the internet and making a bunch of calls, many recruiters resort to sending over grey area candidates when they cant find the ideal person. If they have absolute certainty that the person they want to submit will not be considered, they are much less likely to do so in the first place. And if they still submit those candidates, it might be time to reevaluate who you are partnering with. Also, request to see some benchmark resumes after your conversation. This is a great way to see if the recruiter on the other end is getting the picture. Plus it saves time because you wont waste a week while they’re out looking for the wrong person.
If you’re stranded on a tropical island, what’s the first thing you do? Look for low hanging fruit. The first steps most agency recruiters are going to take are:
- Look at their network
- Post the jobs
- Search Monster, Dice, CareerBuilder and so on.
It’s a mixture of frustration and embarrassment when an awesome Monster resume comes over from an agency with a 25% markup on his or her head. Pssst, if only you had spent that extra 10-15 minutes to look on Monster, cross your fingers no one finds out! Create a prayer shrine the hiring manager won’t dig the candidate either. This sort of thing invalidates paying for expensive tools like Monster and Career Builder in the first place. It’s easily avoidable and perhaps one of the most expensive oversights you can think of. Before handing over your precious jobs, make sure all the base-line options are taken care of. It will save you money and leave the more difficult and time consuming passive candidate generation to those savvy agency cats. You are paying them an awful lot of money to do this, let’s make them work for it. Once you have completed rolling out this strategy, make a list of the people you have or are in the process of considering. Detail where you have posted and what resources you’ve tapped as well. Send this out with your request to agencies. Now they know where you’ve been, thus saving them time on delivering you quality candidates you have not seen yet. It is about partnering and making sure your hiring manager is a happy camper with quick results.
– Art Amela, Recruiter
