Recruiting is difficult, we all know that. Naturally then, it can make a lot of sense for a company to engage outside assistance and support from a recruitment consultancy. These firms work hard to bring the best candidates forward for your open positions, helping you hire the talent you need.
There are several misconceptions out there about how to best work with these firms, though, so we’ve prepared this helpful article to dispel some of those misconceptions. Below are five ways you can make sure your recruitment consultancy is working at their best.
Keep Them on their Toes
If you really want your firm to be working their hardest, the keyword is competition. If you treat them as a partner to your business, there’s just too great a chance they’ll become lazy and complacent.
It’s important, then, to engage as many firms as possible for each vacancy. Sure, there’s a chance that they’ll trip over each other in their efforts, talking to some of the same candidates over and over again. That’s fine, it will remind them that they need to work a bit harder than the others. And in any case, it’s a very small price to pay for the possibility that one of them might find a candidate that the others don’t.
Speaking of finding candidates, don’t let up on your own recruitment efforts, either! Make sure your internal staff are turning over every stone in their own network in search of qualified candidates for those same vacancies. Sometimes, you can beat the recruiters at their own game – finding the right candidate before them so you don’t have to pay them anything. What a great way to save on your budget! And the recruiters? They’ll realise that they’ll just have to work a bit harder and faster next time.
Keep Them at a Distance
On a somewhat related note, it’s helpful to keep recruitment firms mindful of their place in the world, keeping them at arm’s length from your business. You don’t want to let them get too close, or they may start acting like a partner rather than a vendor.
One great way of creating this barrier is to ensure there’s never any direct communication between the recruiter and the hiring manager, or any of the other staff that the vacant position would interact with. No matter what anyone says, recruiters don’t really need to get a firsthand sense for personalities or management styles. That sort of thing isn’t helpful at all when assessing a candidate’s fit for a position. Similarly, there’s never a good reason to invite a recruiter to visit your workplace; anything they would need to know about the culture and environment, they can get from you or from your website.
Don’t Show Your Cards
Information, as the saying goes, is power. You certainly don’t want to give a recruiter too much power, so don’t give them too much information.
You can put this strategy in place right at the very beginning of a search assignment. Share the basics about the position with the recruiter, of course, but make sure to hold a few key pieces of information back. If you’ve got a bit of flexibility on the salary range, or if some of the candidate attributes are ‘nice-to-haves’ rather than ‘must-haves’, there’s really no need for them to know that. Maybe there’s a possibility for the new hire to be promoted fairly quickly because their manager is moving up, but that’ll just make for a great surprise when it happens. Oh, and don’t just withhold the positive things, either. If there have been some challenging dynamics on the team, perhaps some turnover, you’d certainly never want to let on about things like that.
Later in the hiring process, when candidates are being interviewed, you’ll almost certainly have recruiters asking for feedback on the candidates they’ve put forward. They’ll ask all sorts of questions: why you liked this one, and what specifically you didn’t like about that one. How pushy! All the recruiter needs to know is whether their candidate will be coming back for another interview or not. Anything else, frankly, is just nobody’s business but your own, and a distraction from their work.
Play Hard to Get
A recruiter should always understand and appreciate how busy you are, and one way to accomplish this is to make sure that it’s as difficult as possible to reach you. That’s getting tougher, in this hyper-connected world that makes it possible to contact you by phone, email, and even text messages. A good rule of thumb is to let at least one full business day pass before returning one of their messages; two days is even better. If the recruiter follows a message with another one before you’ve gotten back to them, you can feel free to start the count again. How else will they learn patience?
This becomes doubly important when it comes to scheduling interviews with candidates. Now, there are two people who must understand how busy your schedule is, so it becomes even more important to show how limited your availability is. If there’s an interview to be scheduled, for example, never provide more than one possible interview time for any given work week. Naturally, the more people involved in the interview, the more complex this process should become, but the calculation is simple. If there are two interviewers, there should only be one available time slot offered for any given two-week period. Three weeks for three interviewers, and so forth.
Make Them Work for It
Although we talk about recruitment as being complex and difficult, all recruitment consultants are really doing are finding people for you to interview and hire. That being the case, it’s understood – even expected! – that the process shouldn’t be an easy one.
A good first step is to make your hiring process as long and cumbersome as possible. Arrange for there to be as many interviews as you can. Six is a good number to start with, but in some cases, eight or even ten interviews isn’t out of the question. You’ll almost certainly have candidates drop out of the process, either because they’re not willing to interview that many times (the nerve!), or because they’ve accepted an offer from another company. Your recruitment consultant will understand that this is natural; it’s all part of the selection process.
Of course, interviews aren’t the only way to keep your recruiter and their candidates hopping. There are any number of tests and assessments that can be assigned at any stage of the hiring process, whether they’re directly related to the job, or only barely. It can be especially instructive to assign lengthy and challenging tests very early on, even before a first interview. If a candidate isn’t willing to participate, to devote a few hours to the hiring process before they’ve come in for an interview, how committed are they, really? This is a fantastic way of weeding out people who probably weren’t that interested anyway.
Naturally, according to the ‘don’t show your cards’ principle as outlined above, you won’t tell the recruiter ahead of time how many interviews you’re planning for, or what sorts of tests and assessments you’ll be assigning. They’ll find out when they need to know.
Of course, at some point in this process, you’ll reach the final stages with a candidate who would be a great fit for the job. Someone who has all the experience and skills you’re looking for, who would work well with the manager and the rest of the team, and whose salary expectations are a match. It’s very tempting at this point for hiring companies to become singularly focused on that one candidate and jump right to extending an offer. Don’t let this happen to you – you never know who else might be out there!
No matter how excellent the candidate you’re considering hiring, and no matter how many candidates your recruitment consultancy has presented, always ask to see just a few more. Your recruiter will appreciate your diligence, and will enjoy the challenge. And naturally, the candidate you could hire will wait for you to make a final decision. At least, they will if they really wanted to work for your company to begin with.
Final Thoughts
We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this bit of satirical fun, and that you’ve had a few smiles along the way. The advice above is, of course, everything that a company shouldn’t do when working with a recruitment consultancy. Maybe we missed a few, though. What’s your best piece of (bad) advice?