Whether or not your recruitment agency will headhunt your staff is one of the first questions you should ask before instructing them. If you are to form a strong working relationship with them and my advice is, you should. They are the best placed people to be your promoter to the wider industry, helping with promoting you as an employer of choice and giving you brand awareness.
It’s a Monday morning. Coffee in hand you stroll into the office with a positive mind set for a productive week ahead. You open your email to read the dreaded words “resignation letter”. Your best member of staff has been offered another position with your main competitor! All plans are scrapped as your week will now be spent either going into battle with counter offers or wading through irrelevant CV’s and organising interviews. You need help. And so, a quick Google search later you’ve found the perfect super-enthusiastic recruitment consultant, terms are agreed, and you wait for a flood of recommendations to arrive in your inbox.
But is that the end of the story? Did you ask the right questions before instructing your new agency?
As you’ll know from your own experience and previous blogs, we work in a candidate-driven marketplace. Our talent pool is vastly limited and as recruitment agencies we must work 24/7 trying to find the perfect candidate which matches what the clients want to pay. Agreeing on the rates the agency is going to charge you and their rebate terms is rarely missed out, but have you ever asked them “what is your policy on headhunting our staff or representing them should they contact you” If the answer is no, don’t worry you’re not alone. This is something we rarely get asked but we should, as this is one of the biggest stumbling blocks when trying to form an honest, trusting working relationship.
Every agency is different and will operate on their own policy. This is a concept that I struggled with when I first formed Block Recruit. I had clients that I was passionate about and no way was I going to take their staff, even if they contacted me or applied for a job I was working on! I would turn them away saying there was a conflict of interest. I wanted to give complete loyalty even if the client didn’t give it to me. But my problem eventually was this: I simply ran out of candidates.
So where do you get your talent pool from? Taking candidates from another sector with transferable skills is an option but not one that clients will consider, when my competitor, who doesn’t operate to the same level of loyalty, is sending someone MIRPM, with 5 years’ experience. Do you choose to work for some clients and not others? I tried this but again it limited the talent pool which I could refer onto the client. Clients need to be able to access the best match and skill set available for the position they need to fill. If that best match is currently with another client, how do you choose one client over another, whilst remaining loyal to both?
I believe the answer lies back at the beginning, on that Monday morning when you’re in need of a recruitment agency and you are going through their terms before signing on the dotted line. Agreeing on the rates that they’ll charge you and their rebate terms are standard. But you should also ask:
“What’s your policy on headhunting our staff for competitors or representing them should they contact you?”
Get the question out in the open and by doing so honesty and transparency will be evident at the very beginning of what will hopefully be a long and fruitful relationship. You’ll come to an agreement that both parties are happy with and will have paved the way for parameters in which you’ll work together in the future.
Article by: Alice Cadfan-Lewis, Director at Block Recruit