What to Look For When Choosing a Recruiting Firm

You don’t have to work with a recruiting firm to help fill your hiring needs. But there are good reasons to do so. You can save time and gain valuable expertise, filling critical positions faster with access to top-tier talent that will keep your company moving forward. If you partner with the right recruiting firm, that is. So how do you pick that ideal partner?

Just like choosing the right candidate for any position, it’s all about finding the perfect match. Here’s what to look for in a recruiting firm that fits your firm.

Deep Expertise and Networks Relevant to Your Search

A firm that is well-experienced but not in your industry or in filling the roles you need won’t be much help. That’s especially true when you’re dealing with difficult-to-fill positions. For example, at Power-4, within the Life Sciences space, we specialize in sourcing senior clinical and executive placements in the $80-350K range. So we focus our network-building and candidate engagement in those areas. When a client contacts us for help, we already know who might be a great match for them.

The right recruiting firm is passionate about keeping their candidate networks up-to-date and about introducing themselves to new prospective candidates – those elusive but critical individuals who aren’t looking to make a move but would consider an interesting offer. At Power-4, we are very proud of our outreach response ratios from those “passive candidates,” which is well above industry averages. Over 40% of new candidates we reach out to engage back with Power-4 to hear about current or future jobs.

Seasoned Professionals

Ask specifically about who within the recruiting firm will be working on your behalf. Will they be successful veterans of the hiring wars, or will they be the new recruiters on the block – eager, perhaps, but without the depth of experience (or the deep contacts) and credibility necessary to quickly connect you with exceptional talent?

Good Listeners

Sourcing and engaging candidates is a sales and cultivation process, particularly when you’re filling difficult positions where the pool is small and competition for the best is intense. Your recruiting firm must sell your company’s value proposition as well as the career opportunity, and to do that they need two things. They need to understand your company culture and working environment, and they need to know precisely what you want and need in a candidate.

That takes active listening and a willingness to dig deeper. If needed, will they help you define or refine your value proposition outreach to candidates and/or the job description?

Committed Working Partner

Any recruiting firm can send you a pile of resumes, and do it quickly, too. So what? If you’re searching for that one outstanding candidate, a long list of unqualified candidates simply wastes your time and delays the process. A great recruiting firm will do most of the work for you, then deliver only a few candidates – each one highly qualified and interested.

But they won’t stop there, they will stay with you, offering advice and support as you need or helping you communicate with the candidate, to complete the hiring process.

People You Like and Want to Work With

Professional credentials and experience have great value, no doubt about it. But the entire world of HR and Talent Acquisition is built on relationships. Within your company, you call it cultural fit. Any successful salesperson can tell you that people prefer to do business with people they like as well as respect. A likable and results-oriented recruiting team that knows their stuff will appeal more and represent your company more passionately to the candidates you want most.