Optimizing the relationship with a recruitment agency | Checklist in 8 points

Whether you are a startup or a large account, collaborating with a specialized recruitment firm can be extremely beneficial for your business. The expertise of headhunting consultants and their network are assets to ensure the success of your talent search.

Thanks to their knowledge of the market, they allow you to recruit rare pearls that are difficult to find or when requested and thus to ensure the success of your innovation or digital transformation projects.

But Faced with an increasingly tight job market, it is important to set up the conditions for a fruitful collaboration with your specialized recruitment firm.Here are some 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 start of the collaboration. Provide the firm with information on your recruitment needs (specificity of the position, project, required profile, etc.) but also on your sector of activity, on your corporate culture, on your challenges, about the team with which the person recruited will be required to collaborate and even the details of their daily future in the company as soon as they join. The more accurate information the recruitment agency has about the position to be filled, the more it will understand your business and your context beyond the need for recruitment, the more efficient and convincing it will be with the targeted candidates.

💡 At Skillink, human interaction and communication are central elements of our methodology and the key to our reactivity ! Our expert and specialized consultants are the direct intermediaries between your Hiring Managers or your Human Resources teams and the candidates potentially available on the job market. There are no research officers in our firm. Our consultants thus better master the Pitch your business and are more convincing. Ce Organizational principle at Skillink is perfectly conducive to a perfect fluidity of exchanges with our customers on their missions!

2. Set clear expectations and immediately share the concessions you are ready to make

Make sure the recruitment agency understands your expectations and your specifications for the position to be filled. This includes details about technical skills (hard skills) required for the position, on behavioral skills, the famous soft skills, on The experience, on The level of responsibilities, etc. The more specific the expectations are, the more relevant the candidates presented will be. Do not hesitate to draw a robot portrait of your ideal candidate but do not forget to communicate, from the start, the concessions you are ready to make, even if it means activating them only after a predefined research time. There would be no worse scenario in a tight market than to see your partner firm miss out on potential candidates that you could have seriously considered because they were not aware of your flexibility.

💡 At Skillink, to ensure that the recruitment team has an optimal understanding of your expectations, we have put in place A kick-off phase or “preliminary framing”, which also takes place directly on the premises of our customers. For one hour to half a day, depending on the context, when the headhunt is launched, the team of consultants in charge of recruitment meets with the client teams, sets up a climate of trust with Hiring Managers, analyzes the real need and the context, Challenge the job brief, identifies the strengths of the role and clarifies the recruitment process. Among other things, our teams will have the following objectives: precisely define your ICP (Ideal Candidate Profile) and your MVP (Minimum Viable Profile). It will then be a question for them to navigate between these two points of reference to be sure of proposing constructive solutions. They will also analyze your tools and processes with your HR teams in order to fully understand the strengths, limitations, and risks of the recruiting organization. This also makes it possible to determine a tailor-made operating mode for each mission in a partnership-based approach.

3. Establish ongoing collaboration and keep in touch

Collaboration with a recruitment agency is a continuous process requiring successive iterations. Schedule regular updates on the progress of research and interviews. Be ready to provide constructive feedback on proposed candidates(especially with regard to the reasons why you did not select some of them) and to adjust the criteria if necessary.

💡 At Skillink, we organize regular follow-up points with our customers throughout the mission. We carry out workshops with them in order toavoid any tunnel effect and that allows us toiteratively optimize our selection of top talent.

We meet and present the first candidates quickly and then continuously throughout the recruitment mission. As such, we set ourselves the ambitious goal of propose an initial profile within 2 weeks to calibrate the real need and validate or modify the criteria defined during the kick-off while avoiding any misunderstandings.

4. Be responsive and convincing

When the recruitment agency introduces you to candidates, React quickly ! 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 lead them to accept other offers. In addition, an efficient specialized office will allow you to have access to sourcing “off market” candidates who are not actively looking for and that they approached directly for you. If so, these candidates may not react exactly like candidates who applied to you. Potentially, it remains to Convince them to join you ! So be careful not to reject high-potential candidates too quickly because of “apparent dilettantism”, this is 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 supporting you at all stages of the process. We alert you when your feedback times are too long or when you need to be more convincing with candidates. We make sure we are well acquainted The challenges of timing and motivation in relation to other processes of recruitment in which our candidates could participate outside of the process with our client. Transparency and responsiveness are required when it comes to recruitment so as not to lose an interesting candidate for your position.

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5. Work as a team to assess candidate skills

Competency assessment cannot be the preserve of a single stakeholder or reserved for a specific stage in the process. It is everyone's responsibility at all times. In a tight market, each interaction must be balanced in selection and seduction, so it is good to Divide roles and operate as a team and in confidence with your recruitment agency.

The strength of a firm that deploys a direct approach method is in particular in providing you with solutions that you cannot reach by yourself. So you have to Adjust the right shot when you ask your partner to strongly select certain skills at the risk of missing out on his creativity in sending applications and no longer taking advantage of his ability to be a source of proposals. It is obviously not a question of doing “open doors” and wasting time with profiles out of scope, but you must also get involved in skills analysis by working in close collaboration with your firm.

💡 At Skillink, our consultants work as a team to more creativity and less analysis bias in their pre-selection. They are also specialized consultants, fully capable of select skills finely especially since there are no researchers at our place. Our consultants therefore master their subject from start to finish. When there is doubt about a candidate, we do not hesitate to highlight our points of vigilance, the interest being that you have all the keys so that we can effectively challenge the real skills of candidates together. Finally, challenging also means comparing, which is why we offer our clients different applications (with no limit in number) to help them in The benchmark necessary for their decision-making process.

6. Involve the firm at every stage

The science of feedback works! Involve the recruitment agency in the preparation and the coordination of interviews. It can provide you with useful information about candidates and help you increase the efficiency of your process.

A recruitment agency is A trusted third party which offers you the unique chance to get honest and objective feedback from the candidate (and vice versa) on his motivation, step by step. An effective closing is prepared from the first contact with the candidate because in the end, it will be too late to ask the right questions.

💡 At Skillink, we are used to providing our customers with meetings with our candidates in advance, comprehensive evaluation interview reports for each of the recommended candidates. We provide you with accurate information on their career path, on their motivations, on the aspects that make us think that their application would be relevant for your position. After interviews with your Hiring Managers, we debrief with candidates in order to gather important information on their position and motivation in relation to your position. This collaboration throughout the interview processes is an important aspect of our methodology which allows us to help our clients in mastering the recruitment of the best candidates until closing!

7. Be sure to communicate well in case of brief changes

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

💡 Skillink has built its approach in contact with innovative startups and R&D units of large groups, “test & learn” is part of our DNA. To recruit candidates who will allow 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, our universe has taught us thatit is essential to accept that a client can redefine the profile of the candidate sought during the mission and to have to adapt accordingly. In this iterative approach, we do not limit the number of qualified candidates we offer you. Our support is “all the way” to ensure you recruit THE right person for the job!

8. Share your feedback to improve collaboration over the long term

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

💡 At Skillink, at the end of the process, we give ourselves time to take stock of the progress of the mission in a logic of continuous improvement of the customer relationship. We analyze finely KPIs and data relating to “time to hire” and the volume of searches: number of candidates sent, number of candidates pre-selected, number of candidates pre-selected, number of candidates presented, met by the client, number of job proposals sent, accepted, reasons for drops, etc. Everything is screened in order to learn the lessons of recruitment and be even more efficient in the coming ones!

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

At Skillink, as a recruitment consultancy firm dedicated to digital and innovation, we provide our clients with 360° recruitment solutions to succeed in all their goals. Whether it's about recruit jobs in tension or rare profiles, of quickly surround yourself with strategic profiles, to carry out a comprehensive recruitment plan or even build and train a team of internal recruiters, our solutions are adapted to all your digital recruitment challenges regardless of the profiles sought, the context of your company and your problems.

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

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