In the battle for attracting the best talent for your organisation, standard recruitment best practices usually include using the services of a recruitment consultancy. This is because they have access to a network of candidates, many of whom are available immediately with the experience and expertise you need.
The role of the recruitment consultancy
Working with a recruitment consultancy should be a rewarding and successful experience, saving you time to get on with other aspects of your role. To this end, their role is to understand your organisation, its needs and culture, to source, vet and interview appropriate candidates and provide you with a shortlist in an efficient and effective manner.
How do you get off to the right start?
Start by writing down your requirements. This will allow you to assess what each position requires in terms of skills, experience and personal profile. It will also allow you to consider whether it is a role you can split between existing employees or recruit for internally. The more details you have about the position(s) the easier and quicker your position(s) will be filled.
Finding the right recruitment consultancy
There are many recruitment consultancies to choose from. We believe that finding the one that will suit your organisation means you need to consider the following:
- Do they specialise in your market?
- Do they recruit for your discipline?
- How long have they been operating for?
- Have they recruited for your competitors or similar organisations?
- Do they have a consultative approach?
- Can they help you in other ways? What value can they add?
- What proof / evidence can they provide to demonstrate their previous experience?
- Can they commit to working to an agreed deadline?
- Are they willing to come to meet you if you want them to?
- What comfort do you have in their ability to be confidential with the information you give them?
Provide a full job specification
The more detail you provide in your job specification, the more accurate the consultancy will be able to make its search, and the better it will be able to brief the candidates about the role. Poor job specifications seriously hamper effective recruitment search.
Know your budget/have sign off
In our experience one of the main reasons why the recruitment process takes longer than necessary is that there is no definite sign-off procedure in place for the role and there is no defined budget.
Set realistic timescales for reviewing CVs and the interview process
It can often take longer than you think.
Developing a successful relationship with your recruitment consultancy
Often the relationship between HR departments and recruitment consultancies can be difficult if the consultancy is not adept at building effective business relationships; establishing clear lines of communication and managing expectation.
Working with a professional recruitment consultancy will make a noticeable difference. There’s no real alternative to hiring a consultancy with a long track record to ensure the process is as smooth as possible.
Keeping in touch with your consultancy
They need to keep the candidates interested, particularly the best ones, who may be looking at several other positions simultaneously. A good consultancy will be working with you to keep abreast of developments and feed them back in a timely manner to a relevant candidates.
If they don’t know what’s happening at your end it becomes difficult for them to do this. They’ll be working against you, not with you. Contact is everything in the recruitment process, on both sides.
Take their advice
You are not going to offer the job to someone you are not happy with. What the consultancy can do is to advise you on how they think the candidates match up against each other, their salary / contract rate expectations, how likely you are to find what you are looking for, and whether you are in any danger of losing the candidate you are after to another position.
Of course you are not obliged to take any advice, after all, it is your organisation and no one understands it better, but a professional recruitment consultant is able to impart the market view of the situation and in some cases, say what might be ‘unsayable’ internally, which is the benefit of third party consultation.
