As a hiring manager, you might have mixed feelings about working with a recruiter.
Sometimes when people consider the recruiting industry it can be confusing, unappealing, or maybe even negative. Perhaps you had a bad experience working with a staffing agency and swore them off altogether. Oftentimes, the lack of desire to work with a recruiter can stem from simply not understanding the benefits of doing so, or from choosing an agency that isn’t tailored to your hiring needs. Like every profession, there are great recruiting professionals and not so great ones.The key is to create a relationship with an agency that is best suited for your needs.

For starters, you will want to differentiate the professional recruiters from the unprofessional ones, which will start with the phone call. If you receive a phone call from someone who’s a professional, they’d never try and sell you on the phone and they’d certainly never expect that you just happen to have a bunch of open jobs ready to hand over to a stranger. The goal of the phone call is to set up a time to meet in person, more importantly, to leave you with a positive feeling about them and the company they work for.

It’s important to note that is is not just about what they are saying, it’s also about the feeling they leave you with after the conversation is over. If someone calls you wanting to meet, and they don’t get under your skin in the first 30 sec. give them a chance, they may just save your day sometime in the future!

If a recruiter does call you at work in the middle of a hectic day and you don’t have a second to spare, ask for their number and call them back at a more suitable time or better yet tell them to send you a calendar invite. Many will be flexible, and even happy to talk to you outside of work hours and reschedule until it works.

If you simply decide that you don’t want to engage with recruiters at all, you might miss the opportunity to create a relationship with someone who might be a perfect match for your communication style or who has a major network in the very special niche that is your business.You never know when the perfect solution for your future needs may come along and for this reason, so it’s important to have an open mind.

It will be important to build a relationship BEFORE the need arises, so that when a hiring need does arise you can be sure the recruiting professional already knows what you want. Usually when a need for a temp or direct hire comes up, things are busier than normal, and you will need help ASAP. In cases such as these, it is better to be in touch with a professional recruiter who you already trust and have a relationship with. The benefits of partnering with someone before a need arises who understands the in’s and out’s of what you do every day, rather than someone you’ve only seen online and know very little about their company can make or break your recruiting experience.

There are practical benefits for your business that recruiters have to offer. It’s a recruiting professional’s job to be up on the current market trends, to keep a large and diverse pipeline of professionals, and to know what the market rates and salaries are. Utilize the information they want to share with you, cause let’s face it, you simply don’t have time to do the research and do your day job!  Working with a recruiting company is a great way to get access to a broader network and to leverage the knowledge they are immersed in every day.

Using a recruiter or working with a staffing agency should save you time. Contracts take time, especially if you’re a large company and your legal department needs to look over the contract before signing! Getting all the redlining out of the way ahead of time so you aren’t going back and forth negotiating the contract while also communicating about potential talent is an advantage. The less there is to hold up the process when you have an open job, the faster you can start receiving candidates and interviewing.

Ultimately, the whole point of using a recruiter or working with a recruiting company is to save you time and effort, and to expand your network of quality candidates. If the recruiter you are working with is adding to your time and effort spent hiring, or is providing you with subpar candidates, you probably aren’t working with the right recruiter or company. By taking the time before you have an opening to build a valuable relationship with the right recruiter or company, you can change the narrative of your former experiences and make your job as a hiring manager easier.