The thing most employers dislike about handing a role to an agency is the silence. You brief someone, then you wait, with no real idea whether anything is happening.
So here is exactly what we do. More to the point, what we do differently at each step.
1. You tell us what you need.
Through the site or on a call. We ask about the job rather than the job title, and you get a straight view of what it will take. If your budget is wrong for that skill set in your area, you hear it on day one, not in week six when nothing has landed.
2. We find, screen and shortlist.
Job boards, our own database, and going out and approaching people directly. All of that is standard everywhere. The screening isn't.
Most screening calls ask a candidate whether they can do something, and almost everybody says yes. We ask them to describe a time they did it. Talk me through the last fault you diagnosed off a drawing. What was wrong, how did you work it out, what did you try first. You learn more in four minutes of that than in an hour of somebody agreeing with a job description.
So we turn down people who read well on paper, and our shortlists come out shorter than you might expect. On an engineering job earlier this year that meant sending exactly one name, with a plain explanation of why there was only one. That client had been trying to fill the role for four months, and the man we sent started about four weeks after they briefed us.
3. You interview, we support.
However you want to run it. If you would like help structuring the interview we will build the plan with you. If you would rather we handled the lot, we can. Either way we keep candidates warm, which mostly means talking to them between your stages rather than leaving them to wonder. A good candidate who hears nothing for ten days is usually a good candidate who has accepted something else.
4. You hire the right person.
Backed by a three-month replacement and rebate guarantee, and you pay nothing at all until they actually start.
Where it usually goes wrong
Steps one and four are the easy ones. Any agency can take a brief and send an invoice.
Step two is where a job is won or lost, and it's the one that's tempting to rush. Six CVs the day after a briefing looks like progress. It isn't, if four of them don't meet the brief. And you'll lose an evening reading them and a fortnight interviewing, and you'll be back where you started with two months gone.
And a long shortlist isn't generosity. It moves the rejecting from us to you, which is the part of the work you were paying somebody else to do.
The other half of that step is what happens when the advert doesn't work. We rewrite it and go again rather than coming back to tell you the brief was unrealistic. Sometimes the brief really is unrealistic and we'll say so, but that should be the conclusion after a couple of goes, not the first thing you hear.
What you can reasonably expect
Across our business the average time to hire is 29 days. It covers every division and every kind of role, the easy ones and the awkward ones together.
If you want to talk through an engineering role you've got open, we'll tell you honestly how it looks and roughly how long it should take.
Book a call and we'll go from there.
