If you are looking to hire new talent, it is important to find a partner who can help you achieve your goals. That is why we encourage you to ask these key questions before engaging with a third-party recruiter:
Candidate Experience
You want to make sure that your candidates have a positive experience with the recruiter and feel comfortable sharing their experiences with you. You also want to make sure that the recruiter is able to provide feedback about the candidate’s experience—both positive and negative—so that you can address any issues before they become major problems.
A good recruiting company ensures that they leave the candidates with a positive experience at the end of the interaction. The positive interactions stems from not just being polite, punctual and prompt. It also stems from the effort that recruiter has done in understanding the position.
Even the candidates who are not looking to move right now are the potential candidates for future job openings and if your candidate has a positive experience when applying to your company then they will be more likely to apply again in future if they have an opening.
The candidate should feel like they were listened to and that their needs were understood by your company, this can be achieved by asking questions about what they want out of a new job or why they are leaving their current one. The recruiter should also take note of what skills they have which could be useful to your company and highlight them during the conversation so that you both understand which direction you need to go in order to get what you both want.
Set Expectations and Raise the Bar
There’s a reason you decide to hire a recruiting partner. You need an extra set of hands, someone who can handle the hard part so you can focus on what matters most.
So why would you set your expectations low?
It’s true that recruiters are experts at finding candidates for open positions. But a good recruiter does much more than just send over resumes for an opening: they’re also your advisor who helps you think through the entire process. And that means telling you things you may not have known about how to attract top talent, competitor analysis, and keyword research—and then delivering results that help you find the right people to fill the role.
You should also expect total transparency from them when it comes to their candidate reach out process and how they stay in touch with people they’ve met at networking events or conferences or anywhere else where they meet potential hires.
Domain Experience
It is very important to understand whether your recruiting partner has understanding and experience in the domain that they are recruiting. This is specially true in technology domain. Technology domain is vast and can be daunting, but it is important that recruiters have a fair understanding of the domain. Experienced candidates are easily put off by recruiters who have no idea about the domain in which they are recruiting.
For example, if you’re an experienced tech professional with years of experience in web development and you’re looking for a new job, then it’s probably not going to go well if you’re talking with someone who doesn’t understand what “frontend” means or why it matters when coding websites!
Lastly, there is one pitch from a recruiting company that you can ignore right away. If they tell you that they’ve been in recruiting business for 50 years, just ignore and disregard!
Technology changes every few years; 50 years of past experience does not tell you anything. If a recruiter tells you they’ve been in business for decades, ask them how technology has changed their business over the years and what changes they’ve made as a result of those changes.
