Worried About Your Recruiting Brand? Don’t Forget Your Agencies

Companies rightfully spend a lot of time burnishing their image for recruiting.

They want to put their best face forward when creating brand awareness with candidates – and have invested millions of dollars, justifiably, to ensure candidates have a great experience from early awareness all the way through engagement and employment.

But does your investment in your brand stop with your recruiting team and recruiting technology? Here’s a thought; when you reach out to recruiting agencies, they are judging you as well. They determine how hard they will work on your job, what types of candidates to send you, and whether to steer the best (and most appropriate) candidates your way.

Keeping this in mind, the ultimate impact to your company can be quite significant. Luckily, we’ve got a few tips on how to use recruiting technology and more to expand the scope of your recruiting brand beyond company headquarters.

3 Ways to Expand your Recruiting Brand

Keeping in touch with headhunters can make all the difference.

1. Choice matters. Make sure you have truly intelligent ways to choose agencies for each individual job. Track record matters. Objective data matters. All of this information is now available on agencies if you have the right tools and recruiting technology.

   You’ll want to know not only data on how they have performed on your company’s jobs, but how they have performed on jobs for companies across the industry. Don’t choose agencies based on a sales pitch, a website, or a best friend. Do your research and choose wisely – your recruiting brand is at stake. Need more help? Here’s some tips in a previous blog post, Choosing a Headhunter? How to Eliminate the Headache.

2. Don’t be shy. Make what you need REALLY clear. The simpler the job description the better. Think about bullet points, not paragraphs. Describe what the person will be doing at least as much as the previous experience the candidate will need.

   Then use candidate feedback to help agencies hone in on the best possible candidate. In our experience, the best headhunters make the most progress due to feedback on the first round of candidates.

3. A little bit of the golden rule. Treat agencies the way you treat your candidates. If you want them to be an extension of your brand, actions speak louder than words. If your brand is all about professionalism and respect, but you only occasionally log into your ATS to update your candidate status and inform your agency on what’s going on, your agency is going to walk, or even worse – remain sort of engaged.

   Invest time upfront to create the right working relationship, then be regimented with the frequency of your overall search updates. You don’t need to call your headhunters every day, but a quick status update once a week keeps everyone running at the right speed.

All in all, our advice? Utilize recruiting technology to be sure you are getting reliable data on agencies, think about how you communicate, and activate a little bit of the golden rule.

What steps have you taken to expand you recruiting brand beyond your office doors? How do you use recruiting technology to make good choices about agencies? We’d love to hear your strategy.

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