Working with Recruiters to Improve Your Candidate Pool

A lot of companies, understandably, do not trust contingency recruiters to screen candidates because they don’t ask candidates for mistakes, failures, or weaker points,  and instead hype successes, accomplishments, and strengths. Companies wanting to do their own candidate screening might contact five or six contingency recruiters to just send them resumes. As a result, many contingency recruiters have admitted, “Knowing a bunch of recruiters are sending resumes to the same company, all of us just throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks.”

Within a few hours you can be deluged with resumes. But if you follow my first tip and require those recruiters to let candidates know they’ll have to arrange reference calls, you’ll receive fewer but better candidates.

However, many clients have said they still get too many poor candidates, who ultimately would not arrange calls with their bosses. Why? Many say that the recruiters told weak candidates: “Say you agree to arrange reference calls for now, because if you make a favorable impression maybe they’ll hire you without requiring you to arrange the calls.”

Many of our clients have evolved a different model, which they say gets much better results from contingency recruiters.

Grant an exclusive contract to one contingency recruitment firm. Be sure to reference check recruiters and get positive reviews before offering the exclusive.

In exchange, that firm agrees to conduct a short interview with candidates and send you brief reports on all candidates they present to you. The advantages are:

1. You can be sure all candidates presented will be told they will eventually have to arrange calls with managers they’ve reported to.
2. It will save you time.
3. You will have much fewer, but much better candidates.

To learn more about Topgrading, visit www.topgrading.com