"We want the roles closed yesterday!"

Sounds familiar? It's that dreaded situation where every open role need to be prioritized and urgently filled. Inundated with all the administrative work, you barely have any time to source out for the right talent. There's no promising lead from direct applications either. So what do you do?

Depending on the budget available, you might consider working with a recruitment agency. After all, the nature of their role requires them to source for talent day in and out while building out a sizeable pipeline. Given the number of agencies out there, it can get pretty tricky in deciding which one to work with.

Unfortunately, the value proposition that you're going to hear from them is going to sound a tad similar.

• We are specialists in X industry.
• We have a strong network / established relationship with X community.
• We have a database of prescreened talent.
• We curate and only work with the best talent out there.
• We can provide you relevant profiles within X hours / days.

It's hard to evaluate considering that result matters more than what they pitch. On the surface level, seek out recommendations and reviews. Keep in mind that bigger doesn't mean better. Once you've done your research, keep your list down to a maximum of 3 and start a conversation.

In the learning phase, you're trying to get as much information as possible. Here are some questions that might help you out.

• Tell me more about the current landscape / market / industry.
• What are talent looking out for in a company?
• What's your approach / process in reaching out to talent?
• How do you source for these talent?
• Here's a job description. How would you determine and evaluate the right talent?
• How would you pitch our company to these talent?
• How do you prescreen and conduct an interview?

Although subjective, a decent agency would take on a consultative approach and ask you the right questions to learn more about your company, culture, roles, challenges, key criterias / traits etc minus the big promises. How personal and flexible are they? How aligned to your company are they in terms of their reachout / communication? How well do they know their stuff? It's important to take note that they'll be the one forming a first impression of your company to the talent out there so be strict in choosing your representation.

A common mistake that companies make is to work with multiple agencies for the same roles. You might assume that more agencies = more candidates = quicker turnaround. Wrong. It's not a surprise that these agencies are probably tapping the same limited talent pool. The race to submit profiles first would inevitably lead to more noise (unqualified candidates) and work for you. Not only are you disincentivizing the recruiters working on your role, you're also contributing to the negative experience that the talent out there have to face from constant bombardment by these people.

To prevent this, conduct a short trial. Set constraints eg limiting it to 1 - 2 profiles so that you can have a sense of the quality of talent they surface to you. If there are 3 agencies and roles, allocate 1 each based on their familiarity, access and choice. This is an elimination method that would ideally drill it down to just one recruitment agency.

Terms are usually set between 18% to 22% of base annual salary. Although negotiable, do remember that they're risking all the hard work and effort in return for nothing as it's based on results (contingency arrangement, which is the common one). It's a steep price to pay especially if cost of hire is part of your KPI. Try as much as possible to delegate only the hardest role to fill or switch to a retainer plan if there are multiple roles and you really don't have the time and resources to work on them.

So there you go. Although it's always a better option to build your own in-house recruitment team, there are times when working with a recruitment agency makes much more economical sense based on hiring frequency and number of roles. And for the latter, I hope that this brief guide would help you navigate through the selection process at the very least.