What’s a recruiting partnership, really?

Specifics, please.

Something that drives me crazy: using the term “partnership” without explaining wtf that actually means.

It’s a lazy way of saying “we’re different” or “we’re better than our competition” or “we want you to listen to us” without explaining why.

I’ve made these mistakes plenty of times myself. In the agency recruiting world, there’s a big difference between transactional firms (aka resume mills who blast out minimally vetted resumes) and consultative firms (who do root causes analysis of hiring challenges & process issues and actually solve a problem.)

Which raises the real question: how should companies determine what sorts of recruiting agencies they work with? What’s the real “why” that agencies should be able to answer?

There’s really two things an agency should be able to do:

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

👉Convert those people into new hires more efficiently than their client can. (Middle/bottom of funnel.) This is where true “partnering” comes in.

Drilling down more specifically into both of those:

1. Skill specialization

Do they have recruiters who know the skill domain cold?

Do they know it better than generalist recruiters?

Can they get in the weeds to build credibility with the candidates they’re recruiting?

(Or are they just repeating keywords?)

2. Bandwidth

Can they give internal recruiting and hiring teams their time back?

Do they have enough resources to take on the workload?

Can they vet in enough detail where their work doesn’t need to be double checked?

3. Industry experience

Are they familiar with the specifics of the industry demands?

Are they aware of specific challenges and quirks that go beyond skill based vetting?

4. Market experience

Do they know the specific challenges of a local geography?

5. Headhunting (no, it’s not a dirty word)

Do they go beyond posting jobs and hoping for the best?

Do you know how to target candidates who aren’t actively looking?

Do they know how to position your company in a compelling way that motivates people to want to work there?

Do they know how to phrase things in candidate-centric language and tell candidates what’s better about your company than their current role?

Can they sell?

6. Process knowledge

Do they know what makes the internal recruiting side of the hiring process succeed or fail?

Can you learn them?

Do you have deficiencies they can help you improve upon?

Hit me up with points 7, 8 and 9 that I forgot…