How to improve the client relationship

The point of outsourcing any service is to partner with a specialist supplier who knows what they’re doing and can ultimately make your own life easier by providing a product or service that you don’t have the time or resources to achieve yourself.

Such is the relationship between a recruitment agency and their clients; the recruiter provides talent to the client to enable business growth. So why in some cases are the relationships not always the easiest with certain clients and what can we do to make each other’s lives easier?

Let’s get to know each other

We make on-site visits a core part of the recruitment process. The best recruiters take the opportunity to meet with as many people involved in the process as possible. We’ll ensure we ask detailed questions. The goal is to understand the culture of your company, your values, your process, and what it takes for a candidate to succeed once placed.

You will decline candidates, a recruiter submits; likely more than once. However, a good recruiter’s job is not to just keep throwing candidates your way until they land the perfect candidate. The goal is to understand why the candidate didn’t match up and work from there. This is mainly for the candidates benefit, so that the recruiter can brief them for other roles. Telling a recruiter that the candidate wasn’t strong enough or ‘wouldn’t fit the culture’ simply isn’t enough. Why are they not strong enough? Was it their lack of technology experience? Was their design portfolio not good enough? Did their references not give a good referral? Whatever in-depth information you can give the recruiter, they are only going to use it, to provide and identify better candidates,

It’s all about trust

A recruitment agencies aim is to become a staffing partner and vendor to your company, but more of an extension to your team. To do this, you need build a level of trust and respect.

So respect each other’s agreements, especially if they’re pre-arranged. Let’s just assume you have already agreed on a fee before the recruitment process has started. Deciding that you want to renegotiate the fee mid-way through the process will always cause chaos. There is no actual charge upfront to bring a recruitment agency on-board, just as there’s no charge from the client to work with them. You’ll have both spent a lot of time working at an agreed rate. We have to schedule our own workload and some of this is based on the agreement we have in place. So make sure everything is signed off and stays that way.

At the end of the day we both need each other to succeed as separate businesses. As your recruitment partner, ultimately we should act as a staffing consultancy, to help, guide and provide business growth through new talent. The best way to succeed is through a collaborative approach where we play to each other’s strength and build on a working relationship through repeated fulfilment.