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Home » HR Processes » Recruitment and Selection » External Recruitment » External Recruitment: Recruitment Agencies

External Recruitment: Recruitment Agencies

The recruitment agency is a specialized company, which provides the organizations with potential new hires based on delivered specification. The recruitment agency uses its specialty in the area of the recruitment to attract, motivate and deliver the job candidate to the organization.

The recruitment agency lives from the fees collected for successful hires. It is not a common market practice to pay for the job vacancy open with the recruitment agency. The most common practice is to pay “success fee”. The recruitment agency is a business, which does not need a huge investment and many former HRM Employees start their own business in the area of the recruitment.

How the recruitment agency works?

The recruitment agency uses its brand name to post the job vacancies of its customers. The customer can decide about the confidentiality of the job vacancy and it is posted under the name of the recruitment agency then. In a traditional business, the recruitment agency does not use the direct search approach; it is based on the database search.

The database is a set of job applicants, who decide to change their careers and they provide the recruitment agency with the right to present their resume to the potential employers. The recruitment agency has to make the job interview with the candidate and it has to put the results to the database. Many times, the recruitment agency reports the number of applicants in its database, but the number says nothing about the real success of the recruitment agency.

When the recruitment agency gets a request from the organization, the consultant starts to search the potential job candidate in the database. When there is a match, the agency tries to contact the candidate and asks for the approval to present the candidate to the organization. When this case happens, the search can be quickly finished.

In the next step, the recruitment agency posts a job vacancy on its website, job search sites and many other channels it usually uses. The role of the recruitment agency is to pre-select the best suitable candidate for the job position to meet the requirements of the organization.

During the next phases of the recruitment agency keeps the contact with the job candidate, schedules the job interviews and provides both parties with the feedback. The feedback and keeping the contact with the job candidate is very important part of the role of the recruitment agency as it helps to keep the job candidate attracted.

How to choose the recruitment agency?

The organization should limit the number of the recruitment agencies to cooperate with. The HR Recruiter has to keep a close contact with the recruitment agency and the limited number of peers is essential in this effort. The optimum number of agencies is up to 5 recruitment agencies per organization.

The recruitment agencies are usually specialized in industries or function and the selected portfolio should cover all the needs of the organization.

The most important aspects in selecting the recruitment agency are the brand name of the recruitment agency, single point of contact and knowledge of the job market and the organization.

The single point of contact can be a very weak point in the recruitment agency. The recruitment agency has to keep its team stable and to be able to transfer the knowledge quickly. The recruitment agency changing the point of the contact quickly is not a partner to cooperate with as the HRM Function spends a lot of time learning the consultant the expected level of candidates and the expected set of competencies.

The good recruitment agency also provides the client with a simple report about their own observation from the interview with the job candidate and the sources of motivation to change the career path to another organization.

The good recruitment agency knows the limits of the job market and it does not try to get huge portfolio of clients. The recruitment agency has to be able to handle all the candidates, the requests for the positions and the clients should not compete for the candidates from the recruitment agency.

Sources of the success of the recruitment agency?

The real success of the recruitment agency is hard to be measured and evaluated. When selecting the new recruitment agency, it is important to observe the power of the brand name of the recruitment agency, referencing clients and some numbers.

The good number to be oriented in the situation is to see the number of days to deliver the candidate to the organization per industry or function. Other important numbers to see are the number of clients and positions per the consultant. As there is no consultant just for one organization, it is important to see the allocation of time for your own organization.

The good recruitment agency also provides the information about the fluctuation and skills of the consultants employed. This is a good indicator for the prediction of the stability of the recruitment agency and how often the consultant can be changed.

The organization should require the possibility to have a presentation of the consultants available to make a final choice of the consultant assigned to the organization. The organization has to be prepared that the best consultant can be quickly overloaded by other companies and it is not a good strategy to have the best consultant available.