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There is a strong belief that an Employer must be working with ‘n’ number of vendors to de-risk their hiring needs. Well, this is a wrong belief.
Engaging Recruitment Vendors
One needs to understand that the entire recruitment industry (Vendor side) works based on keywords. They (Recruitment Vendors) pick up keywords in the job description, run the keyword search in resumes and dump as many resumes as possible in the lowest amount of time because they know that they are competing with dozen other vendors. As a result, employers become the dumpyard of keyword based resumes and employer resources (Recruiters/hiring managers) have to scan through hundreds of resumes to understand which few resumes are matching their requirement. A lot of time and effort is lost in this process.
Needless to say, employers need to invest in resources to engage with ALL the vendors they share requirements with. They need to provide the requirement understanding to all the vendors, they need to provide updates of resumes submitted by these vendors, they (employers) need to engage with multiple vendors to schedule interviews etc. etc. There is a lot of time and effort lost in this process and a lot of times there is no outcome.
In most cases, the engagement between the recruitment vendors and the employer resources (mostly coordinators) is bitter because employer resources do not give importance to recruitment vendors because they dump the junk and as a result, there is always a gap in employer and recruitment vendor engagement. Because of ineffective engagement, Recruitment Vendors route their focus elsewhere. Net result- unpredictable outcome and one can not say with surety when the requirements will get fulfilled.
The Solution-One Vendor Model
It is recommended that employers should work with ONE recruitment vendor who they have chosen after careful evaluation of vendors competency, background and experience. The employer should demand the vendor that certain (depends on complexity, volume and timeline to fulfil) recruiters, account managers are 100% dedicated to fulfil the hiring needs until defined timelines.
Employers should do an effective job of translating the requirement understanding to the dedicated recruiting team and there should be an ongoing two-way open communication channel to iron out any issues/gaps. This will not only make the vendor keen to support employers hiring needs but will also ensure that the vendor generates the required ROI on the investments.
Hidden benefit of working with ONE vendor will also result in a ‘dedicated recruiting team’ becoming the recruitment experts for you as an employer because they will understand and experience the nuances of hiring for you, they will understand how to sell the organization to potential candidates, they will understand what kind of candidates will fly and what kind of candidates will not fly. Not only employer will start to see a much higher quality of candidates but they (employer) will save a lot of time and effort in fulfilling their hiring needs with a predictable outcome.
If your hiring needs are more and cannot be catered by one vendor, split your hiring needs between 2-3 vendors. I have tried and experienced ONE VENDOR Model in over 60-70 employer environments and I have seen success rates of over 97-98%.
Happy Recruiting !!
