Can you learn from your recruiting partner?

If you can’t, I have news…

Your recruiting partner should be able to outperform your internal team.

That might sound controversial to some, but it’s not. It’s common sense. Why would you hire a company to do something that you could do better, faster, and cheaper yourself?

And I’m not talking in absolutes – that any partner should be “better” than you. The two primary reasons why any uses an agency are:

1. Specialization: they know a skill set or candidate market better than you.

2. Bandwidth: they have a greater capacity to handle either volume or immediacy (or both.)

A lot of internal talent acquisition teams are strapped for time. (Ok, pretty much all of them.) But from here, you can break down what it is you really need a recruiting partner for:

👉Finding the right people faster than you can on their own. (Top of the funnel.)

👉Converting those people into new hires more efficiently than you can. (Middle/bottom of the funnel.)

The first point is how the Resume Mills stay in business. The second is where true “partnering” comes in. 

Sourcing and vetting are table stakes. (Though from the thousands of conversations I’ve had with internal TA types over the years, I don’t think we can assume that about vetting across the board in this industry, either.)

But the goal is not recruiting, it’s hiring. Converting your candidates into employees. Which involves a lot: “selling” the candidates with effective messaging, running efficient debriefs, streamlining the steps of the process, tracking your pipeline, maintaining open and meaningful communication, gaining real-time insights into the candidate market, understanding what your competitors in hiring are doing, doing compensation analysis, knowing when to alter the search, etc. 

If you have all that figured out, why do you even need an external partner?

Likewise: if you have to tell your agency partner how to do their job, you picked the wrong one.

James Hornick

Partner at Hirewell. #3 Ranked Sarcastic Commenter on LinkedIn.