Five Key Principles when Partnering with a Third Party Recruiter
Tom Wagner, Managing Principal – RSG Talent
As businesses grow sometimes it is necessary to partner with a third party recruiter to help manage that growth. Whether you need the third party to manage a number of openings because you lack the recruiting infrastructure to handle your current hiring needs or if you simply need assistance with filling a niche hard-to-fill role, there are five key principles you want to keep in mind when partnering with a third party recruiter.
1) Recruiting is a Team Sport
When you decide to work with a third party recruiter you are making a decision to partner with a subject matter expert who should be able to help solve an important problem you have with hiring. However, this decision to use a third party is not a transaction but a partnership with the recruiting agency. To make this partnership successful an employer and the third party need to take ownership of their role and responsibilities within this process.
- The third party is the subject matter expert when it comes recruiting. The third party will be responsible for sourcing strategies, identifying viable labor pools for candidates, engaging and qualifying talent, and providing on-going candidate management on behalf of the employer. The third party should also be providing regular communications on candidates in process and status of those candidates.
- The employer and the recruiting stakeholders will be responsible for establishing a clearly understood process for candidate review and the interview process for the role(s) the third party was hired to manage. Moreover, it is critical that the employer be timely in their recruiting actions and available for regular communication with the third party.
2) Sharing of Employer and Role Specific Information
Just as important as the employer and third party recruiter working in partnership, it is essential that the employer is sharing all necessary information to the third party about the assigned role and also about their business. The third party in this relationship becomes an extension of the employer organization in the marketplace, and consequently it’s imperative that the third party can speak directly to the role and organization as if they were an employee.
To that end, the third party recruiter will need to understand the employer’s business and how the role specifically fits into the organization. Accurate information on the responsibilities of the position will help drive the development of the sourcing strategy for the role, and if the role is not clearly defined the identification of good candidates will be slowed. There shouldn’t be any secrets around the compensation elements for the position, the reporting structure for the position, and what the possible career tracks for the role could be.
3. Developing a Value Proposition for the Role
The information about the business and the position is very important, but also developing a value proposition for the opportunity is crucial to the success of a third party and employer partnership. Even though a third party may have all the information on the business and role from a content perspective, they also need to understand any positive and negative intangibles about the role and organization. Negative intangibles could include any issues with turnover, company stability, and changes in leadership while positive intangibles could include future opportunities for the role, pending business deals, and moving to a new office location.
Once all this information has been shared between the employer and third party, the two need to develop an agreed upon value proposition of three to five points that easily describes why a prospective candidate should choose the role and organization as a viable next step in their career. This is as an elevator speech on why to work for your employer, and each stakeholder and member of the employer’s hiring team along with the third party recruiter should be able to present the value proposition comfortably and convincingly. Additionally, how to respond to a candidate’s concern about any negative intangibles should be discussed amongst the employer’s hiring team.
4. Set Appropriate Expectations for Success
When discussing an assignment with the third party, an employer should be provided with a realistic expectation of what the third party will deliver. Ultimately that should be a successful candidate, but there are process steps and checkpoints during a search that a third party should be providing.
At the start of a search, a third party should be transparent in telling you what to expect in terms of how long sourcing will take before candidates are presented, roughly how many candidates can be expected for a specific role, and what the major opportunities and obstacles the third party expects to encounter with filling the role. These expectations need to be realistic.
Once the search has started, the employer should expect regular communication and reporting from the third party. The communication and reporting should be tailored to the needs of the hiring manager or employer stakeholder managing the search. The third party needs to be open to the hiring manager’s needs and responsive in delivering back the information he/she requires.
Finally, in addition to the third party providing timely reporting and communication, the hiring manager also needs to be engaged and accessible to the third party to provide necessary feedback on sources, competitors, candidates and obstacles that may be impacting the ultimate hiring for the role.
Appropriate expectations at the start of a search builds trust in the partnership, and will lead to a more successful and efficient search in the end.
5. Sharing the Risk of Hiring
With filling a position whether internally or with the help of a third party, there is an inherent risk associated with hiring. That risk is most associated with candidates as neither an employer or a third party can control the actions of a candidate, which makes the candidate the greatest variable in the process. However, an employer and third party can greatly mitigate that risk by establishing a high level of trust to fulfill their responsibilities of the search, and agreeing to share the risk of the search to insure a successful outcome. A well partnered search will lead to a better recruiting experience for the candidate, which will ultimately lead to the candidate acting in a more predictable and less variable manner.
Conclusion
An employer and third party recruiting partnership that follows these five principals will lead to the greatest hiring success. It’s important to adhere to all five when partnering as ignoring simply one of the principles can lead to a slower or possibly unsuccessful search. Employers and third parties should expect and demand extensive communication from each other during any search, and strive to develop a trust that will engender good will in current and future searches.