Collaboration with recruitment agencies provides rewards

The partnership should be a rewarding experience for a business. Your recruiter saves you time and delivers tangible value to your business through the quality of candidates they source, labour market advice offered and insights.

Achieving this level of value-adding recruitment partnership requires an understanding by businesses of the basic actions they need to take to enable their recruitment partner to deliver maximum value to their organisation.

Five suggestions

The following five suggestions are strong starting points:

1. Have a strategy... and share it
   No matter its size, your organisation needs to have a clear resourcing strategy and your recruitment partner must be fully briefed on it. For larger businesses, this resourcing strategy needs to be supported by a clear employer brand and preferably an employee value proposition. Combined, these components offer your business a way to articulate fully what you expect from your recruiter and fairly measure whether they are delivering on those expectations.

2. Allow your recruitment partners to be the expert they are
   Recruitment agencies are experts in their fields. Many companies still inadvertently limit themselves from unlocking the full value their recruitment partners could offer by not allowing those recruiters to do what they do best. By giving your recruiter the freedom to deliver, your business will be able to capitalise fully on their expertise - both in terms of sourcing the best candidates and offering vital input regarding labour markets and trends.

3. Involve your line managers
   Ultimately, the line manager is the individual who stands to most affected if the wrong person ends up under his or her supervision. It makes sense, therefore, to introduce line managers into the recruitment partnership and invite them to play a comprehensive part in detailing the qualities they want to see in the new employees placed under their care. It is seldom an easy aspect of the recruitment relationship, and often requires careful management by HR, but the benefits and value it unlocks are well worth the effort.

4. Keep communicating
   Often, a recruitment partnership starts out with a flurry of communication opportunities but as time passes and both parties become comfortable in the arrangement, communication is often the first aspect of the relationship to suffer. Over time, this inevitably leads to, or heightens, feelings of discontent. Make a conscious effort to keep the communication flowing. Better yet, make it the responsibility of your recruitment partner to do so, and then give them your full cooperation.

5. Provide actionable feedback
   No matter how open you feel the lines of communication are with your recruitment partner, unless you are giving them feedback they can really use, those lines need to be tightened. Whether its reasons why a candidate was not suitable or discomfort about a process or attitude, the feedback you provide to your recruitment partner must be very specific and, preferably, include ways you feel the situation can be rectified. Be candid, critical and, when warranted, complimentary. However, whatever the feedback, make sure it is specific.

While they're no guarantee of a happy and mutually-beneficial recruitment partnership, carting out these five simple guidelines will almost certainly enhance the potential for your business to derive maximum value from its recruitment partners.