Whether you are the staffing agency owner, management, a sales person or recruiter the following attributes are how many of you would describe your ideal customer:
- Local to where you are for ease of access and face-to-face meetings
- Encourage a high-touch personal relationship with their hiring managers
- Allow your sales reps to walk their hallways
- Answer the phone every time you call
- Hiring managers provide jobs with meaningful titles, job and task descriptions with comprehensive specifications for what their ideal candidate(s) possess for experience, qualifications, education and cultural fit
- Realistic bill rates that reflect market conditions for the level of expertise required
- Sufficient dollar spread between the bill and pay rates to allow for a fair profit margin
- Hiring managers provide feedback on every candidate submitted
- For every one (1) candidate submission a request for an interview happens
The reality of the staffing agency world that we toil in daily has altered dramatically just as the expectations from the customers served has. If you have been reluctant to adapt, time is likely running out. The staffing firm clients implement a supplier program with internal controls around how they will work with their staffing partners that usually results in the above described ideal staffing agency / customer relationship being eliminated.
So, how is a staffing firm supposed to succeed when they are often not in a position to ask questions and get direct feedback from hiring managers in a timely manner?
The blueprint for how to succeed as a staffing firm whether the customer encourages a high touch or low touch/no touch relationship in order to win more interviews and make placements requires a consistent approach from how they recruit.
The staffing partners who are typically ranked as one of the top suppliers monthly in any type of staffing program have honed their abilities to deliver and always outperform their competition. These staffing agencies approach each open job they receive from their customers as fillable until their customer demonstrates through factual historical data they are in a no-win situation.
These are the successful staffing firm behaviors that increase profitabilty:
- They understand that the hiring managers have limited time to review unqualified candidate resumes and that this is a byproduct of their primary responsibility
- Know what the SLAs are throughout their staffing firm for each customer with a singular goal for meeting and exceeding as their top priority
- Are able to quickly dissect what are important professional attributes and expertise required for each open job they are recruiting on
- Understand that they must produce qualified candidates that fit the financial model (bill rate)
- Submit completely qualified candidates for consideration within hours from when the open job opportunity was released to them and their competition
- They have developed talent pools in advance of the requirements being released (they use empirical data and apply predictive analytics)
- Understand what the customer hiring managers ideal candidate profile looks like for every position based on past interview requests, offers and hires
- Do not wait to receive further clarification or details on the position before they begin to recruit
- Employ technology that enables their recruiters to eliminate any manual time wasters that can be automated to perform their recruiting activities
- Submit as many qualified candidates as they are allowed within the first 24-hours from when the open job is released
- Their entire organization understands that they must possess a much greater sense of urgency and that speed-to-market is foremost in beating their competition at recruiting top talent
So, whats the moral of this story?
Hiring managers are quick to associate great and poor performing staffing suppliers with the resumes submitted for their open jobs. Those that make the hiring managers life easy by presenting the best available and qualified candidates for their positions are quickly viewed as reliable. These staffing firms are adept at applying a consistent and rigorous qualification process for the candidates they present for consideration and receive a positive reputation for their recruiting performance. Its pretty straight forward and simple. We are providing a service to people that do not have the time to perform quality control and will not pay for the privilege of doing our jobs themselves.
If you like what you see, be sure to check out our infographic: 12 Recruiter Behaviors That Increase Profitability.