Optimizing your relationship with a recruitment agency | 8-point checklist

Whether you're a start-up or a major corporation, working with a specialized recruitment agency can be extremely beneficial to your company. The expertise and network of our headhunting consultants will ensure the success of your talent search.

Thanks to their knowledge of the market, they can help you recruit rare pearls who are hard to find or over-subscribed, and thus ensure the success of your innovation or digital transformation projects.

But in an increasingly tense job market, it's important to set up the conditions for a fruitful collaboration with your specialized recruitment agency. Here are a few keys to ensure the success of your cooperation: 

1. Communicate transparently and share in-depth information

Establish clear communication and share detailed information from the outset. Provide the recruitment agency with information not only about your recruitment needs (specificity of the position, project, profile required...) but also about your sector of activity, your corporate culture, your challenges, the team with which the person recruited will be working, and even the details of his or her future day-to-day life in the company as soon as he or she joins. The more precise information the recruitment agency has about the position to be filled, and the more it understands your company and your context beyond the recruitment need, the more effective and convincing it will be with the targeted candidates.

💡 At Skillink, human interaction and communication are central to our methodology and the key to our responsiveness! Our expert and specialized consultants are the direct intermediaries between your Hiring Managers or Human Resources teams and the candidates potentially available on the job market. There are no search managers at our firm. As a result, our consultants have a better grasp of your company's pitch and are more convincing. This organizational principle at Skillink is conducive to smooth exchanges with our customers on their assignments! 

2. Set clear expectations and immediately share the concessions you're willing to make

Make sure that the recruitment agency fully understands your expectations and specifications for the position to be filled. This includes details of the technical skills (hard skills) required for the position, behavioral skills(the famous soft skills), experience, level of responsibility, etc. The more precise your expectations, the more relevant the candidates you present will be. Don't hesitate to draw up a profile of your ideal candidate, but don't forget to communicate, from the outset, the concessions you're prepared to make, even if it means activating them only after a predefined search period. There would be no worse scenario in a tight market than to see your partner firm miss out on potential candidates whom you could have seriously considered because they were unaware of your flexibility. 

💡 At Skillink, to ensure that the team in charge of recruitment has an optimum understanding of your expectations, we have set up a kick-off or "preliminary scoping" phase which also takes place directly on our customers' premises. For an hour to half a day, depending on the context, at the start of the headhunting process, the team of consultants in charge of recruitment meets the customer's teams, establishes a climate of trust with the Hiring Managers, analyzes the real need and the context, challenges the job brief, identifies the strengths of the role and clarifies the recruitment process. One of our teams' objectives is to precisely define your ICP (Ideal Candidate Profile) and MVP (Minimum Viable Profile ). They will then navigate between these two benchmarks to be sure of proposing constructive solutions. They will also analyze your tools and processes with your HR teams, so as to fully understand the strengths, limitations and risks of your recruitment organization. This also enables us to determine a tailor-made modus operandi for each assignment as part of a partnership approach. 

3. Establish ongoing collaboration and keep in touch

Working with a recruitment agency is a continuous process requiring successive iterations. Plan regular updates on the progress of the search and interviews. Be ready to provide constructive feedback on the candidates proposed(especially on the reasons why some were not selected) and to adjust criteria if necessary.

💡 At Skillink, we organize regular follow-up meetings with our customers throughout the assignment. We hold workshops with them toavoid any tunnel effect , and this enables us toiteratively optimize our selection of the best talent.

We meet and present the first candidates rapidly, then continuously throughout the recruitment process. As such, we set ourselves the ambitious target of proposing an initial profile within 2 weeks, in order to calibrate the need against reality and validate or modify the criteria defined during the kick-off, avoiding any misunderstandings.

4. Be responsive and convincing

Talented candidates are often highly sought-after profiles on the market. Too long a response time could cause them to lose interest in your position or accept other offers. On the other hand, an efficient recruitment agency will give you access to "off-market" candidates who are not actively looking for a job, but whom they have approached directly on your behalf. In this case, these candidates may not react exactly like candidates who have applied to you. Potentially, you still have to convince them to join you! Be careful, then, not to reject high-potential candidates too quickly on the grounds of "apparent dilettantism" - an attitude that can sometimes result from the direct approach recruitment method itself.

💡 At Skillink, we send you selections of qualified candidates quickly and regularly, and provide you with maximum certainty by accompanying you every step of the way. We alert you when your return times are too long or when you need to be more convincing with candidates. We make sure we know what is at stake in terms of timing and motivation with regard to other recruitment processes our candidates may be involved in outside the process with our client. Transparency and responsiveness are essential in recruitment, to ensure that you don't lose an interesting candidate for your position. 

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5. Work as a team to assess candidates' skills 

Skills assessment cannot be the prerogative of a single player, or reserved for a specific stage in the process. It's everyone's responsibility at all times. In a tight market, every interaction needs to be balanced between selection and seduction, so it's a good idea to divide up the roles and work as a team with your recruitment agency, based on trust. 

One of the strengths of a firm that deploys a direct approach method is that it can provide you with solutions that you can't reach on your own. It's important to adjust your approach carefully when you ask your partner to select certain skills, otherwise you run the risk of missing out on their creativity when sending out applications, and losing out on their ability to make proposals. Of course, it's not a question of opening doors and wasting time with out-of-scope profiles, but you do need to get involved in the skills analysis by working closely with your firm.

💡 At Skillink, our consultants work as a team for greater creativity and less analytical bias in their pre-selection. What's more, they are specialized consultants, fully capable of selecting the right skills, and all the more so as we have no search managers. Our consultants therefore master their subject from start to finish. When in doubt about a candidate, we don't hesitate to put forward our points of vigilance, the point being that you have all the keys so that together we can effectively challenge the real skills of the candidates. Finally, to challenge is also to compare, which is why we offer our customers different candidates (unlimited in number) to help them in the benchmarking necessary to their decision-making process.  

6. Involve the firm at every stage

The science of feedback works! Involve your recruitment agency in the preparation and coordination of interviews. They'll be able to provide you with useful information about the candidates and help you increase the efficiency of your process.

A recruitment agency is a trusted third party, offering you the unique opportunity to get honest, objective feedback from the candidate (and vice versa) on their motivation, step by step. An effective closing needs to be prepared right from the first contact with the candidate, because by the end it'll be too late to ask the right questions.

💡 At Skillink, we're used to providing our customers with full assessment interview reports for each of our recommended candidates, in advance of meetings with our candidates. We provide you with precise information on their professional background, their motivations, and the aspects that make us think their candidacy would be relevant to your position. Following the interviews with your Hiring Managers, we debrief with the candidates to gather important information on their position and motivation in relation to your position. This collaboration throughout the interview process is an important aspect of our methodology, enabling us to help our customers master the recruitment of the best candidates, right through to closing!

7. Be sure to communicate any brief changes clearly

When using a recruitment agency, if your needs change during the process, communicate these changes quickly. This will avoid wasting time on candidates who no longer match the position to be filled.

💡 Skillink has built its approach through contact with innovative startups and the R&D units of major groups, so "test &learn" is part of our DNA. To recruit candidates who will enable you to disrupt the market, pioneers, you need to know how to think outside the box, set up exploratory approaches and repeat iterations in a structured way. As a digital recruitment firm, we have learned from our experience that it isessential to accept that a customer may redefine the profile of the candidate they are looking for during the course of an assignment , and to adapt accordingly. In this iterative approach, we do not limit the number of qualified candidates we can propose. We go the extra mile to make sure you get THE right person for the job!

8. Share your feedback to improve long-term collaboration

Once the recruitment process is over, take the time to share your feedback with the recruitment agency. This will help them to improve their services in the future, as well as your own processes.

💡 At Skillink, at the end of the process, we take the time to review the progress of the assignment with a view to continuously improving customer relations. We carefully analyze KPIs and data relating to "time to hire" and the volume of searches: number of candidates messaged, number of candidates shortlisted, number of candidates presented, met by the customer, number of hiring proposals sent, accepted, reasons for drops, etc. Everything is scrutinized in order to learn the lessons of recruitment and be even more effective in future!

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By following these 8 keys to success, you'll be able to establish a fruitful collaboration with your recruitment agency and find the candidates who best match your needs.

At Skillink, as a recruitment consultancy dedicated to digital and innovation, we provide our customers with 360° recruitment solutions to help them achieve all their objectives. Whether you're looking to recruit for high-demand professions or rare profiles, surround yourself rapidly with strategic profiles, carry out a large-scale recruitment plan or build and train a team of in-house recruiters, our solutions are adapted to all your digital recruitment challenges, whatever the profiles you're looking for, the context of your company and your issues.  

Find here our Cabinet recruitment solution, for the recruitment of your future managers, experts, executives in the Tech, Digital Marketing, Sales, Product, Data professions, in France and abroad. 

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