So, you’ve decided to use a staffing and search firm

You have decided to engage a staffing and search firm to help find the right employees to fill your open positions. Whether you arrived at the decision because it’s part of your annual staffing and HR plan, or it’s based on a sudden and immediate staffing need, you need to do everything you can to make the engagement a success.

The Lee Group prides itself on its ability to successfully work with its clients and help them achieve their staffing goals. There are two secrets to that success: Communication and partnership.

Clear communication. This is a big, broad category, but extremely important to a successful working relationship with employer and staffing agency. If they don’t have a crystal clear mutual understanding of the goals and strategies for filling a position, valuable time and money can be wasted, and it could end up putting an employee in a bad spot. When you’re working to find the right employee for a position, here are the three most important areas of communication:

• Job description. If the staffing team is to find suitable candidates for a position, the employer must provide a job description that’s specific, accurate and comprehensive. Without a detailed job description, finding a prospective employee will take longer and possibly cost more with insufficient hires that don’t work out.
• Long-term plan for a position. This is where you, as the employer, must be set in your strategy. You need to know if a role is a temp -to-hire position, short-term temporary, etc. It makes a big difference in how the agency will recruit employees. For example, failure to communicate you want to hire someone temporarily with the goal to bring them on as a direct hire could result in wasted time and money if the temp doesn’t know this and doesn’t want a permanent role.
• Strategy for recruitment. Every client’s open job is unique. And every job needs an equally unique strategy for finding the right employee for the position. For example, if you’ve been reading our blog, you’ll notice that The Lee Group has posted several “hot jobs” and open positions. Those postings are just one element in a strategic mix of tactics we use to recruit the perfect employees to fill our clients’ open positions. With each new engagement, we develop a plan and share it with our employer clients, opening a dialog for feedback and questions.

Treat each other as partners. When you decided to engage a staffing and search firm for your hiring needs, you essentially made hiring for your company a team sport – a partnership formed to achieve success. That means each team member needs to respect the expertise of their partners and teammates and trust each other. Trust is essential, whether it’s trusting the other with sensitive information or simply trusting that the other will do their part to meet the objective of the game – which in this case is finding the right employee for the job.

Using a staffing and search firm to assist in your hiring needs was a decision made only after careful consideration of the business value the agency would bring. Doesn’t it make sense to do everything you can to make that relationship and partnership a success?