Since you are reading this text, you are probably just starting to work with a recruitment agency or are not satisfied with the service of an already implemented recruitment provider. However, if you are just at the stage of choosing an agency, it is worth reading this article first, which will help you avoid common mistakes in the decision phase (→ How do you choose the best IT recruitment agency for your business?).

What does it look like to work with an IT recruitment agency?

You will come across a number of models for working with an agency on the market. For the purposes of this article, I will focus on the most popular of these, the Success Fee. In this variant, payment for the service takes place only after the agency successfully fills the vacancy, which is usually when the candidate selected by the client starts a new job. You can read more about this and other models of working with a recruitment agency here Success Fee, IT Outsourcing, RPO? How to choose the best IT recruitment agency service.

A typical collaboration with an agency can be described in these 4 steps:

  1. The company submits the assignment
  2. The agency starts the search and presents some pool of candidates in the form of a CV and often additional information gathered during the interview such as availability, financial expectations, motivation or description of projects if these are not in the CV.
  3. The client selects the most suitable candidates from the pool presented and involves them in its selection process (HR screening, invitation to a hiring manager / tech interview, etc.).
  4. If any of these candidates are successful in the screening process, they are hired by the client and the agency only then invoices them (most agencies also provide a guarantee for each hire, whereby they refund part of the fee or initiate a re-search free of charge if the candidate resigns or is dismissed before the guarantee period expires). If no one from the pool is hired, the agency resumes the search.

Banal right? This model can be very beneficial for the client, and yet I know many people who have been disappointed by such a partnership. Why?

BIGGEST mistake in working with an IT recruitment agency

More often than not, disappointment arises when clients treat the Success Fee model like… Success Fee ;) Unfortunately, the Success Fee model itself encourages a very shallow and transactional nature of the business relationship. It costs the client ‘nothing’ to start such a relationship, so they sometimes don’t get involved in the process, and the agency doesn’t get paid for the work, so they don’t take responsibility for the accepted assignment. Both parties may think ‘if it sticks, it sticks’ ;) In such a situation everything works as long as it works, when it stops then a new supplier or client is sought. Does it have to be this way?

In my experience, the best service is received by those clients who, even under the Success Fee model, work with the agency as if they were paying for each recruitment assignment upfront. In my opinion, whether you pay before or after the service, for every recruitment or just the closed ones, you have the right to demand the same level of service from the agency and to take full responsibility for the delivery of every assignment the agency accepts. On the other hand, since the idea is to act as if you’re paying up front, your commitment to the process and your thoughtful selection of assignments to pass on will be key to achieving mutual success.

So much for philosophy. How do you turn this into practice? Here’s a suggestion of the steps I would take myself if I outsourced my recruitment to a specialist external firm.

Good kick-off meeting at the beginning of cooperation with an IT recruitment agency

This is the framework meeting that will be key to successfully onboarding a new partner. Online is OK, but Onsite is the real gamechanger. You get to know the agency people better and allow them to physically ‘feel’ your company. In my experience, simply visiting a client’s office often has a positive impact on the energy and detail of the offer presentation by recruiters during the onboarding process. What should happen during the kick-off:

  1. Introduce your recruitment team and tell the agency about your company – what are your plans for both business and strictly recruitment, the challenges, why is your service or product being bought by your clients?
  2. Your EVPs, i.e. the unique elements of the offering you are targeting to the labour market.
  3. What specifically do the departments or teams you recruit for do?
  4. What does a typical selection process look like in your company – what stages does it have and what happens during them?
  5. What is the ideal profile of your candidate? Which candidates tend to drop out of the process and which ones are more likely to get an offer than others, and why?
  6. Which recruitments do you find most difficult and why? How does the agency want to go about it? This is an opportunity to align the direction of your recruitment strategy.
  7. What does the agency’s process for recommending candidates look like for your business? What information should be included in the recommendation profiles prepared by the agency?
  8. How is the RODO process resolved when working with an agency?
  9. What level of involvement in coordinating the appointment of interviews with candidates do you expect? Many agencies offer full support in this area.
  10. What communication channels do you prefer?

If you don’t know the answers to some of these questions, don’t worry – a good agency will be able to help you get additional information or prepare communications to candidates – we’ve had cases where we’ve even supported the client in the process of creating authentic and tailored EVPs for their audience.

Successful briefing with an IT recruitment agency

Arranging a briefing for agency recruiters directly with the hiring manager at handover to provide all the information you need about your vacancy. This element is key to a good understanding of your needs and preparing an appropriate sourcing strategy. I would avoid doing a dumb phone call, where you speak to the hiring manager first and then pass this information on to your mentor, who then passes it on to the recruiter delivering the assignment – many key elements can get lost along the way. I’ll also say straight away that a briefing in the form of a sent email with a description attached is pure evil and a recipe for mutual disappointment.

The briefing should end up contracting further collaboration with the agency. What will happen now on the part of external recruiters? When will active sourcing begin? What tools do they intend to use? How do they usually approach such assignments?

Communication on the project and during the collaboration with the IT recruitment agency

This is very important – for an agency to take responsibility for an accepted assignment (even in a success fee model), it needs to know that it will be held regularly accountable for the progress and results of its work. No matter how busy your calendar is – be sure to find at least 15 minutes a week for an update with the agency in the form of an online meeting. This is a guarantee that the agency will either prove the result by managing its own resources or withdraw from the project. In either case, you know where you stand and can take appropriate action. The worst thing is ‘silence in the ether’. You are counting on the result and the agency is counting on the subject, which has proved difficult, to close by itself and the problem will go away by itself.

During such summaries, ask about market data, sourcing results, activities and blockers. Work with the agency to resolve blockers, but also clearly communicate the limits of compromise. If you know that your company will definitely not be introducing fully remote working anytime soon, then there’s no point talking every week about candidates preferring to work remotely – it gets you nowhere. Don’t accept the wool pulled over your eyes, like ‘well we’re working, we’re working, it’s difficult, but soon, hopefully, there will be candidates…’. Expect specifics, prepare yourself a concrete, repeatable agenda. This is also a good way to summarise the statuses of all candidates and avoid receiving calls every other day asking about every candidate in the process. Provide feedback to the agency on an ongoing basis about your perception of their work, but also ask what the agency sees as potential improvements to your collaboration or your running of the recruitment and selection processes.

Try to collect detailed feedback from hiring managers after their interviews with candidates. This is very important information for the agency to allow them to better calibrate their targeting for future candidates.

Collect data from and about the IT recruitment agency

Require written progress reporting in the form of progress summaries or an end-of-project report. A good agency will provide you with data that you can use to build your knowledge of the market and will be a good tool when talking to stakeholders about potential changes to your offering or requirements.

Once a quarter and/or a year, meet with the agency for a longer summary of the collaboration. This is an opportunity for two-way feedback, to further draw the agency into your world, and to prepare the partner for the next period. Figures gathered from a longer period will tell you things you often don’t see on a daily basis. If you are working with more than one agency go ahead and compare these figures with each other, although bear in mind that comparing metrics from e.g. financial recruitment to IT recruitment doesn’t make much sense due to the completely different nature and benchmarks.

Outro

As you can see, a successful working relationship with an agency will depend heavily on both your commitment to the process and the responsibility that the agency should take for the recruitment you accept. If you’re relying on the agency to solve your problems without you, this unfortunately usually ends up in long lists of apathetic recruitment service providers and your feeling unsupported, and it’s all about actually feeling that relief when you hand over a vacancy to an external IT recruitment expert.