As the Irish economy sets to grow by 3.4% in 2021, the needs of companies to recruit volumes of suitably skilled and motivated staff are more significant than ever. Particularly for organisations with no dedicated recruitment or talent-sourcing function, it’s often a necessity even more than a choice to reach out for a recruitment agency’s help to find the best people.
But with pay-per-placement fees associated with agency recruitment and a lot riding on hiring decisions from a business point of view, it’s important to choose a recruitment agency that best suits your culture and requirements. Below we’ve outlined a number of boxes to tick before beginning a partnership with a recruitment agency.
First, the basics. Rather than calling the first agency that pops into your head or the one that a trusted ex-colleague manages, make sure that the agency is working in the space that you’re hoping to recruit in. An award-winning agency recruiting for marketing superstars won’t necessarily have such a great network of IT professionals for instance.
At RECRUITERS, we have dedicated divisions and renowned talent networks in Sales, Marketing, IT, Project Management, Accounting, Finance, HR and Business Support.
I'm sure you've heard this from agencies before: "we have the best talent database in Ireland". These are just words with very little substance. We always share examples of how we have helped businesses in the past to hire specific talent with specific skills. In fact, anyone can view the types of roles we're currently working on to see if they are similar to your own.
You might believe that the bigger the recruitment agency, the better they will be at meeting your expectations and needs. In recruitment, this couldn't be further from the truth. How so? An honest recruitment agency will never approach talent from one of their clients in order to place them within another client. It's really bad for business (and the recruitment industry) if they do!
Larger agencies typically have more clients which ultimately means they have a much smaller pool of talent available for your business. When we hear our competitors talk about being "the biggest agency with hundreds and thousands of clients", you should walk away.
A smaller, more nimble, agency with a tight group of dedicated clients within each sector like RECRUITERS has a much wider talent pool because they have the ability to headhunt great talent from a wider pool of great companies that are not our clients. This gives smaller agencies a massive advantage over the larger agencies which ultimately benefits you and the quality of talent at your disposal.
While niche operations can be well equipped to understand the roles and make the correct selection decisions, it’s also important to be aware of the sort of numbers you’re looking to recruit and whether the chosen agency’s capabilities match this. A slow recruitment process and lack of qualified CVs ultimately slows down your team's success.
Ask your agency about their SLAs in place with other businesses. For instance, our permanent recruitment division has a 98% client satisfaction rating and a 3:1 interview-to-hire ratio. That means for every three CVs we typically send our clients, one person is hired from them.
RECRUITERS also commit to the following SLAs with our contracting sites. We are always flexible and can adapt our approach as requirements change and the agency you work with should do too;
Aside from this, we also internally adhere to the following.
Especially in customer or client-facing roles such as project management or client implementation, the candidates’ communication skills can be equally as, if not more important than what’s on their CV.
For this reason, many companies in these industries enlist the help of recruiters so that they can take some of the guesswork out of an interview, and will pre-screen candidates for softer skills before submitting to the client. If this is a reason you’re looking for agency help, make sure that pre-screening candidates, whether in-person or by phone, is part of their process.
It's also very important to understand how an agency sources its talent. If you're dealing with an inexperienced consultant with a small network within an agency, they will rely on job boards to source your talent. Anyone could do that! In doing so, they are only sourcing talent within the "active job seeker market", i.e. those that are actively seeking a new role online. This just represents 10% of the talent market in Ireland.
A good recruitment agency made up of experienced consultants with deep and wide networks, sources their talent from the "passive job seeker market". This talent pool are not actively looking for a new job. However, they are interested in hearing more about your company and open jobs when we contact them about it.
In 2020, 70% of the people we placed in our clients' businesses were sourced from the passive market. This reflects our consultants' experience and RECRUITERS' talent database that has been curated since 2006.
Different recruitment agencies work in different ways and to different timelines and KPIs. Before committing to one or even a few agencies, it’s essential to find out about their ways of working and whether this aligns with your internal process.
For instance, how do they submit candidates? Is it through a portal or by email? And to whom? Every company has processes and procedures that are idiosyncratic to them, so it’s important to ensure that your chosen agency's processes match yours in as much as is possible to allow for seamless recruitment.
Our account management process at RECRUITERS ensures that each client is assigned a dedicated point of contact who regularly keeps you up-to-date on their progress. In addition, our monthly impact reports highlight the work we've done on your roles and results to date. These meetings are excellent at highlighting process improvements that may be needed on both sides.
You’ll be working very closely with your chosen agency, partnering to develop attractive job specs and ads and regularly providing feedback to make sure there’s a pipeline of the best candidates, so it’s absolutely key that your cultures and outlook match and that you like the consultants you are working with.
You’ll be much better placed to have frank and sometimes difficult conversations if you gel well with your recruitment partner, and having a similar outlook on what makes a good candidate from a communication point of view means the consultant is able to screen for the types of soft skills that you yourself look for in an interview.
Remember, your recruitment partner should be an extension of your management team and so hold similar viewpoints on recruitment matters. As Jim Ryan, Director of Operations at The AA said:
“We chose RECRUITERS over other players in recruitment to build our customer success and contact centre teams. We wanted an agency to not only find the talent we needed but to also challenge our thinking in recruitment strategy and be part of our management team.”
Everything we do at RECRUITERS is in-line with our company values of Honesty, Openness, Drive, Creativity and Fun. You can learn more about us here.
Even if they’re getting the right volume of submissions, seem to gel well with your company culture and are saying all the right things, if your chosen agency isn’t ultimately successful in placing the right candidate within a reasonable amount of time, they might not be the right partner for you.
Often, allowing a couple of prospective new agencies one key test role to work on can be a good way to see which ones are going to be of value in the long run, then possibly narrowing down the list to cut down on the administration of various vendors.
In most industries, it’s now all but essential to work with at least one external recruitment agency to help with complex and ever-changing recruitment needs, so it’s important to treat them as you would any key vendor. Do your research to make sure they can consistently add value to your organisation.
It's important to ask for a recruitment agency's terms of business. This document should set out clearly their fees and guarantees. An agency's fees can range depending on the volume of work, if you're hiring permanent or contracting talent, if the roles are exclusive with one agency or many, and the difficulty of the role. How you pay the fees can also differ. It's important to understand this and measure it up against your cash flow requirements.
A trusted recruitment partner should understand your position and open the conversation to negotiating their fees with you. Don't be afraid to negotiate fees with them. If you feel their fees are too high, ask if they have alternative payment arrangements. For instance, RECRUITERS has an innovative Talent-As-A-Service solution whereby companies pay a small monthly subscription that gives them access to all of our services. It's really cashflow friendly and it's really taking off!
In addition, a good recruitment agency that can back-up their service quality will always have a guarantee in place in case a candidate that they helped you place doesn't work out. At RECRUITERS, we have a three-month guarantee in place which gives our clients peace of mind.
There has been a big surge in support for other Irish-owned businesses since Covid-19. For companies that want to support Irish-owned businesses, this will be an important factor when choosing a recruitment partner.
Let's take a quick look at the recruitment landscape in Ireland:
RECRUITERS was established in 2006 by Gerard Doyle and Brian McFadden. To this day, it is a fully Irish-owned business that is still run by Gerard and Brian. Our mission is and always will be to put consulting back into recruitment. Our profits stay within the Irish economy and are reinvested in our business so as to provide a better quality of service to our clients.
Want to know more? Find out everything you need to know about recruitment agencies in our handy guide.
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