What Are the Key Ingredients of a Good Recruiting Engagement?

What makes a recruiting engagement successful? If you’ve ever used a recruiting agency to fill a position, it’s a good bet that some of the searches have gone better than others. This could be because of the job itself, but it could also be because of your team’s approach and the agency (or agencies) you are using. There are numerous factors that play into any recruiting engagement, but here are four things you should always be considering when you are engaging with a recruiting partner, or if you are already working with one.

Be Ready to Hire

Before having a recruiter take your open position into the market, being ready to hire for that open position.  As silly as this sounds, this does happen. Have a plan prepared for things like candidate qualifications, compensation range, team dynamics, work schedule, success metrics, and onboarding. Knowing that you must hire is only the first step. The real challenge is identifying a candidate profile, having some flexibility, and, most importantly, confidently pursuing candidates with the intent of hiring them. Candidates can feel when a potential employer is genuinely interested in hiring them, and when they are being strung along. Unless you know with absolute certainty that you are ready to commit to hiring, it might not be the right time.

Constructive Feedback

As potential candidates are presented for consideration, it’s important to evaluate them thoroughly and fairly. Once again, having a clearly defined candidate profile will help provide clarity when evaluating a candidate. Providing your recruiting partner with clear, constructive feedback on each candidate isn’t going to offend anyone; it’s going to add clarity. As a recruiter, having clear, constructive feedback is golden. This is what allows us to present candidates that hit the mark.

Swift Communication

Time kills all deals. It’s quite a cliché phrase, but it has tremendous implications for hiring. The stakes are high in the recruiting world, and the best candidates will not stay in the market for long, especially for highly specialized roles. This means that the faster you can review and provide feedback on candidates the better. To mitigate delays, it’s always beneficial to set up multiple lines of communication so that all the stakeholders in the hiring process are aware of updates and developments. One of the worst things that can happen is to miss out on a highly qualified candidate due to a lack of timely communication.

Ensure You Have a Committed Partner

If all else fails, this is the most important element of any good recruiting engagement. You need to have a recruiting agency that is committed to filling your open position. This is also a good time to gauge how a recruiting agency approaches a search. Do they take on most of the searches they are presented with, or do they take the time to understand your hiring needs, and only engage if they have the utmost confidence in filling the role?  Additionally, what happens if a search breaks down or fails to get traction. If that happens, you need to know that your recruiting partner will help to strategically and creatively reinvigorate the search. This is the main point: quality beats quantity. It is always better to have a trusted, go-to partner rather than using multiple agencies with the hope of better results.