3 Things Typical Recruiting Agencies Get Wrong

By Ben White

I have been working in recruitment for the last seven years. In that time, I have sat on both sides of the desk. I have worked as a Head Hunter for a fortune 500 company as well as Corporate Recruiter for a fortune 500 company. I have functioned as a 3rd party agency recruiter as well as hired recruiters to assist in hard to fill roles when I didn’t have the bandwidth.

Having seen recruitment from both sides I can say without hesitation that there are things many 3rd party recruiters consistently get wrong. When I say get wrong, I mean things they do that aren’t in the best interest of their clients. Below are the three things I have found that 3rd party agencies get wrong.

Not transparent enough with Clients

Have you ever engaged a recruiter, signed the agreement just to have them go radio silent on you? I know I have. The sad fact is that it happens all the time. I have personally spoken with recruiters, jumped through hoops to get the agreement approved just to not hear from that recruiter for weeks.

I have literally wondered, are they working on this still? Have they given up? What, if anything are they doing? As a 3rd party recruiter I tried to communicate frequently and I decided to stop working on a search I would let my clients know. However, that’s not always the way it works and sometimes you just end up wondering if your recruiter is doing anything at all on this.

Present the same candidates

Another thing recruiters get wrong is they tell you they have a really exciting candidate but when they send the candidate over its someone you have already seen because they have applied to roles before. Ideally when you engage an agency, the expectation is that they unearth new talent. They are a specialist, right? So you expect them to go out and bring you that talent you yourself aren’t capable of finding.

The sad truth is many 3rd party recruiters use job postings as a way to find candidates. What does that get you? It gets you the same candidates who have applied to your roles previously. Do you think that is worth a 25% percent fee? I don’t. If I am going to fork over twenty thousand dollars I am expecting a passive candidate I have never been able to entice with a posting.

Charge too Much

Finally, working with a 3rd party search firm can be flat out expensive. While I know its supply and demand, wouldn’t it be nice for this partnership to not be such a burden? When you look at an 80k hire at 25% that comes out to about 20k. That can be really challenging for smaller companies or companies on a budget.

However, some companies don’t have much in the way of options. They need the service and they see it as there only option.

So, what’s the solution?

So, I have laid out some of the issues but no solutions. While most recently I was on the corporate side, I am back on the other side of the table now. However, the current company Titus Talent isn’t your standard 3rd party agency. In fact we consider ourselves consultants and we consider the relationships we form to be partnerships. Not only that, but we solve all three issues that I stated above.

We are different by design. The first way we are different is transparency. Every week we send every client a detailed report with a spreadsheet of every single candidate we have reached out to. On that spreadsheet we catalogue everything we did. That includes inmails, personal emails, calls, whatever it is we did to try and reach them, we record it. We add contact information once we obtain it as well. With Titus you will know they we are still working on your role and you will know exactly what we did.

Secondly, we never post any jobs. Every single candidate we find is someone we went out into the market and engaged. We can be assured that every person we present is not only a match from a skills and culture perspective, but you can be sure they have been thoroughly vetted and were a passive candidate. We do what you are supposed to do, supply our clients with candidates they would otherwise not have access to.

Finally we do all that for a fraction of the cast. Most of our client end up saving 50-75% over traditional recruiting firms. Lastly, remember that spreadsheet I mentioned a few paragraphs up? Well as our client you get to keep that and use it as a database moving forward. And if you hire people from that database you know what it costs you? Nothing.

By now you are probably wondering how we manage this. Well I would love to tell you. Feel free to reach out to me via twitter where you see this posted or email me at [email protected] and I will tell you all about how we make a positive impact with our partners.

 

  Back to Recruitment blogs