How to Work With Contingency Recruiters

Assuming you’ve spoken to a few recruiters or agencies you feel are best suited to meet your needs, the most important piece is keeping their interest in filling your open jobs. The top-tier of recruiters isn’t struggling to find job orders or clients with whom they’ll work. Instead, they tend to focus their recruiting efforts on clients they enjoy working with and where they have the highest likelihood of success. How can you make your positions a top priority? Here are some tips on how you can ensure that your openings are a priority to the contingency recruiters you'd most like to work with:

Sell it; don’t just tell it: When you are discussing your hiring needs with a good recruiter, don’t forget that you need to sell them on you, your company, and your hiring process. Be sure to stress your urgency level, the speed and efficiency of your hiring process, and the selling points as to why candidates they present will want to work at your company. Provide recruiters with electronic copies of internal job descriptions, incentive program documents and benefits summaries--these are selling tools for recruiters.

Choose recruiters based on ability and experience rather than solely on cost: Otherwise, you may end up working with a lower echelon recruiter. Recruiters who charge rock-bottom fees may be good for some job orders, but if you are highly selective or have difficult positions to fill, you might have to ‘sweeten the pot’ to make it more appealing. Top performing recruiters don’t work for bargain basement fees and they have little incentive to work on a job order when the payment terms are not advantageous or adhered to.

Responsiveness and feedback are essential: The ‘A’ list recruiters require feedback from you for candidates that are off the mark, and not just for the candidates that are the right fit. Failure to give feedback on submittals is the number one reason that top contingency recruiters stop working on behalf of any given client. These recruiters need to know how far off target they are in order to better hone their aim. Be sure your feedback is detailed and specific. If you’ve given this level of feedback repeatedly and you still aren’t getting candidates that are a fit, it’s time to evaluate whether you are truly working with an ‘A’ list recruiter, or if there is some other problem or issue in your expectations or hiring process.

Follow-up with your best recruiters on a regular basis: You need not wait until they send you a candidate for you to contact them. In fact, a proactive call from you to your top recruiters asking what you can do to help them is one of your strongest tools to keep outside recruiters motivated to work for you, even if they aren’t making placements yet. Your call to them shows that you have a sense of urgency and that you value their time and effort. In this call, you can give examples of candidates you’ve interviewed, or any other information that will help them hone-in on the ideal candidate.

The most important lesson is that there are great recruiters in the market. Your goal is to proactively locate them through any means necessary, sell them on why they should work for you, and continue to engage with them. And, throughout your candidate search, make sure to keep them in the loop on any changes and updates, as well as to subtly ‘sell’ them on working your job orders.

Hiring in all niche markets is getting tougher in this tightening candidate market. Make sure your company has the reputation of being good to work with in the outside recruiter community so you can attract and retain the best third-party, or contingency recruiters, to help you meet all your hiring needs with the best talent in the market.