1. Reliability
“Personnel Director must be sure that the Recruiting Agency will carry out its obligations and will find the right person by the deadline”.
2. Understanding of the Client’s Business and His Tasks
“The Recruiting Agency must have a knack for “listening”, that is, it must be able to understand the Personnel Director’s requirements. Proper understanding of the Customer’s demand guarantees the ultimate result”.
3. Patience
“One of the tasks of the Recruiting Agency employees is to select out of a great number of candidates the right ones for the current vacancy. The “whirlpool”, similar to that in sales.
For example, the procedure to follow is to scan 300-400 resumes, to study thoroughly about 70 of them, to select 15 resumes, to contact and invite for an interview 5 candidates, to send to the company 2 experts.
4. Proficiency
“… top positions. The company may have proficient recruiters of its own, but they may fail to work on direct search projects. The Agency’s experts may prove to be of considerable help in terms of communication with top executives and presentation of top-level candidates”.
5. Capacity for …
“Collaboration with recruiting agencies is beneficial when there is a need to:
- carry out mass selection (considerable time saving, filter);
- carry out the search of rare, exclusive specialists;
- carry out “direct search”;
- headhunt a specific specialist (taking into account the norms of ethics);
- deal with a great quantity of vacancies, when the company can’t manage it on its own;
- replace a working specialist;
- fill in a “last minute/urgent” vacancy, as an additional resource;
- be advised on vacancy balance, situation of the job market etc”.
6. Activity
“Pro-actively informs the Customer of the market trends and offers solutions accordingly: revision of payment policy, change of position title, adjustment of requirements etc”.
7. PR Abilities
“Possess the ability to sell the Customer Company, that is, each Recruiting Agency candidate comes to the interview with a high loyalty level and motivation for the position”.
8. Client-Oriented Performance
“.. the most important thing for an ideal Recruiting Agency is result-oriented performance. Such performance involves not just a profitable sale of services but Recruiting Agency’s incentive to establish lasting mutually beneficial partnership with the Customer”.
9. Establishment of correct relations with the candidates
“A good Recruiting Agency consultant must keep a reliable database of the best candidates in his/her mind or have it readily at hand. This database must be grounded on the personal relations of the consultant with his/her candidates”.
10. Constructiveness
“Readiness for feedback and dialogue, Recruiting Agency’s expert position and well-grounded conclusions and advice. Sometimes vacancies are liable to considerable change. And some Recruiting Agencies demonstrate absence of constructiveness, claiming “you won’t find anyone better, we showed you all candidates, your requirements are overrated”.
P.S. I nearly forgot to mention the opinion of a colleague from Kiev, which I don’t mind to join:
“Ideal Agencies do not exist
Everything depends on the person working on the vacancy, on the quality of the vacancy description, on the extent to which the vacancy description corresponds to the facts, and on the extent to which the requirements to the candidates correspond to their financial incentives”.
