Don’t complain about agencies if you haven’t given enough thought as to how you use them.

One of the problems with using agencies is that there are so many of them and they’ll all tell you how good they are. So what you’ve done is adopt a PSL and engage with a few good suppliers and block the rest out….. Is that really the way to get the best out of the market?

That was fine in the 90s but the world has moved on.

Now you’ve got smart phones, LinkedIn, In-House recruiters, you download music, cars run on electricity and Man City won the Premiership….come on things have evolved! The way you use agencies must evolve too.

Inflexible models like the PSL must give way to faster, leaner, better agency recruitment mechanisms in the same way newspapers have given way to online and desktops are yielding to tablets.

I’m not suggesting you don’t have relationships with agencies but working with 25 agencies paid purely on results, on a PSL is the worst of all solutions for all concerned.

So if there’s a part of your recruitment you’re going to use agencies for:

1. choose a single recruitment partner,
2. take your time finding them,
3. pay them on a monthly retainer,
4. review the relationship as you would any company employee and
5. let them optimise the outsourced element of your recruitment by:
1. working alongside your In-House team,
2. complementing your social media strategy,
3. monitoring new recruitment tools and processes,
4. partnering with and managing external agencies and
5. developing a global network of potential suppliers.

Remembering that the external agency market is huge by comparison to a company’s In-House recruitment team, clever management of that external resource could pay huge dividends in a company’s efforts to hire the best available talent, at the right price and in as timely a fashion as possible.