Working with Employment Recruiters
When in the course of technical staffing, one technical manager works with a recruiter, there are usually many opportunities for better communication and less frustration based on knowing what you each need in order to work well together. The flow of communication is often filtered, not due to any premeditated design, but because there are usually a few people in between the hiring manager (you) and the actual recruiter or recruiters you will be receiving resumes from. Whether that recruiter is in-house or a vendor makes a subtle difference in the way you may wish to manage the process and how you are prepared to deal with flow.
The differences between In-House Only, In-House using “Preferred Vendors”, and Working directly with Vendors (viewed as “chaos” by most HR professionals) are:
Soft costs versus Hard costs – Whether you use a “preferred vendor” or one of your choosing there will be a fee involved for hiring. Do you know whether you have budget money for that fee? Or if your HR department pays that fee from their budget? If you are working with an agency of some kind you can expect 20-50% of the annual salary of the person you want to hire will be charged as a fee.
Understanding your technical needs – This varies but is not confined to In-House or Vendors, if you are lucky you will be working with someone who understands your technology and therefore, your needs. Most of us are not very lucky. This is an area where you will have to really plan ahead and practice your communication skills (over and over).
Understanding your organization and its goals – Your In-House Human Resources department has the best shot at truly understanding your organization and its goals…realistically, you had better be ready to talk about this to whomever does your recruiting.
Timeframe – The Vendors usually have an advantage of turnaround theoretically because of their databases and the volume of resumes they can review.
Contracts – find out the details of contracts with vendors and your HR department before you have a candidate you want to hire…it may lose you the perfect applicant if you are stuck in the middle of a Vendor who needs to be “approved for the list” by HR. Find out what it takes first, and get it done or use a vendor that is already approved.
Here is the list of things to be prepared with:
Job Description (what you haven’t written one? Egad, what are you waiting for?) The job description should have the list of normal duties and the prerequisite skills and education. If there is a job family – where does this position fit in the family? And how many years do you expect a person to remain in this position before moving on in their career? List all the skills required, then all the skills that are “nice-to-have” (it is VERY important to delineate between the two!).
Salary range – here is where you should also list benefits, vacation time, sick time, overtime or bonuses. In short, list all the financial benefits of working with you.
Hours — especially any required overtime or special advantages like “flex-time” but only if you really expect that this position can take advantage of it. If travel is required, how much of it is overnight? What percentage of the year is spent in travel?
If long hours are required to finish a finite project, state it.
For Vendors – any special testing or background checking required.
Now here is the really tricky bit: What kind of person are you looking for? Be careful of politically incorrect statements, focus only on the attributes of the person you are looking for and make a list.
To help you do this I’ve listed some questions I used to have my supervisors answer when they had openings.
What style of person will fit in with the team? Detail oriented? Laid back?
What experience level of skills should the successful candidate have? Refer to job description and describe the level – for example 1 to 2 years of ASP or 6 months intensive experience in an ASP “shop”).
Which skills can you absolutely live without if you got everything else you want?
What key questions will determine if this is a person you want to interview or not? (For example, my tech support department always asked as a screening question: “For how many hours a day can you handle end user calls?”). Make sure that they provide the correct answer and a couple of variations of the correct answer.
List the “deal breakers”… for example: if the background check or drug test comes back “bad”; or if the person plays bidding wars between two prospective employers.
Build a structured interview ahead of time, with questions that get to the core of the skills you want to hire for, and that you will ask ALL candidates. This way you can be assured of a common foundation of information from each candidate when you are evaluating whom to hire.
Okay, so now you are ready to start reviewing the resumes being offered to you for review. This is the hardest part – give clear, direct, and politically correct feedback on why you DON’T want to see someone whose resume you’ve been given. This really helps the recruiter (in-house or vendor) understand what you are looking for. If you have a great employee that you’d like to clone….offer the recruiter a copy of that person’s resume (with the name and address and email stripped out) as an example of what you are looking for. As much of an imposition on your time that it might seem, if you give clear feedback on why you are not interested in a resume, it will build a strong relationship and understanding of your organization, goals, and needs. This is an investment! If you ever need to add or replace in the future, you’ll have “trained” a great resource for finding the right match.
Your preparation also helps you to clarify for yourself (and your existing staff) who and what skills you are looking for…in some cases you discover opportunities to expand skills or broaden goals in this way.