Managing Third Party Recruiter Calls

Corporate recruiters often get bombarded with rather generic requests from staffing and recruiting firms. Fielding these third party recruiter calls and managing the relationships can become a big part of a corporate recruiter’s job. Especially in this economy, third party recruiters are of course scrambling to dig up business (which really should be commended.)

Third party recruiters don’t have the option of sitting on their hands. The best recruiters offer well targeted, concise, and relevant cold calls, but they still cold call – probably a heck of a lot in this market. If you find yourself finding fault with third party recruiters who cold-call, think about your company. Would you want your salespeople surfing ESPN instead of selling insurance, suits, MRI machines – whatever it is your company makes? So the issue is certainly not stopping the calls or questioning whether the third party recruiter should be making the calls – let’s take that issue off the table. The question is, how should corporate recruiters handle the volume of calls without wasting their whole day?

Here are a few tips for managing third party recruiter calls:

1. Don’t fault a recruiter for “going around you.”Corporate recruiters often feel like they are the “gatekeepers” of the recruiter vendor list. They resent that third party recruiters go around them and try to talk to executives and hiring managers to form relationships. There are some productivity issues with having your staff employees managing a heavy volume of unsolicited marketing calls. However, at a base level, faulting a recruiter for going around you is an incredible paradox. Good recruiters are aggressive at ferreting out names and forming relationships. The next time you hear about a recruiter slamming away at every member of your technology team and having lunch with your CFO, maybe it’s time to work with that recruiter. For the recruiting firms that you do work with, you want to demand high performance and work ethic; you want wolves, not sheep. Additionally, by creating yourself as the “gatekeeper,” you become the bottleneck for your entire organization. Your calls with skyrocket, and your recruiting productivity will drop.
2. Don’t work with a bazillion recruiting firms. Even if you work for the largest companies in the world, there is no reason to use a massive list of recruiting vendors. If you value the recruiting relationship as a true partnership, there is simply no way to offer an adequate level of communication to much more than a handful of external recruiters. If you value your current recruiting firms, you can convey that positive message to prospective vendors. If the external recruiter hears you work with five firms and have lunch with them every quarter, it’s pretty intimidating to them. If you have a list of 292 firms, they should logically say, why not work with me? Why not just add me to the list, since the list doesn’t mean much to you? Additionally, if you turn a recruiter down, they simply assume that they need a “way in” to your company and they will proceed to call every hiring manager they can.
3. Focus on the individual recruiter. Many recruiters do a poor job of conveying their niche and how they are differentiated from other recruiters. It can be a frustrating process to figure out who to work with, and the end choices often feel haphazard. However, know that recruiting is, in a sense, general. People are people, and the process of filling reqs doesn’t vary too much between professions. Try to judge third party recruiters more on their personal experience and successes than if their company happens to “specialize” in a given niche.Would that cold-caller have made it past your screen if they said, “I used to be a Java developer myself and I have a great Java specialist who matches up to your Java Developer requisition number A-29d?” – Probably not. The third party recruiter needs to craft their presentation to the individual corporate recruiter, and the corporate recruiter should judge them personally as well. The problem then becomes – how do we judge a TPR personally without spending a lot of time on the process? The easiest way to do this is to ask who the recruiter has worked with in the past – clarify the question with “I mean who have you worked with personally – not your firm.” If the recruiter has some great clients in your local area, chances are they are ok.
4. Don’t focus just on experience.  This may seem like a contradiction of #3, but don’t just focus on the past experience of a third party recruiter. You want to leave room for highly motivated newcomers – the recruiters who will focus entirely on your company and end up doing a great job for you. If the recruiter is aggressive (#1), it might be a good idea to test them out. Recruiters have to start out somewhere, and if you give them a hard (but real!) requirement, they might surprise you.
5. Use technology. A lot of corporate recruiting departments have a system for agency recruiters to leave information about themselves. (It’s usually a voice-mail which hasn’t been picked up since 1989.) Sometimes companies use a web form for collecting information about the company in the format of an RFP, with general questions about the recruiting company. The issue is that for staffing firms, executive recruiters, and all direct hire firms, the reality is that the individual “rep” matters a lot more than the recruiting company itself. Even if you collect data via a web form and analyze the information rationally, it may not lead to the best results. It may be a good idea to focus on the personal attention that your company would receive – ask questions about the individual recruiters and account managers that would be assigned to your company. Be sure to collect information such as client references and Linkedin profiles to further personalize your decision making ability.
6. Don’t be afraid to say no. If you don’t need additional recruiting vendors, the third party recruiter will appreciate honesty over courtesy. Paying them lip service or giving them that ten-year old requirement wastes their time and literally costs them money. Don’t spend your time adding them to a list which you never use. It is a good chance however to collect more information about the firm. Be sure to set up that web form (#5) which you can direct them to.

Corporate recruiters have a lot on their plates. Managing third party recruiter calls is probably at the bottom of their list of priorities. However, it’s often one of the tasks which takes a good chunk of their time. If you step back and look at the process of managing calls, it’s possible to make the process efficient, friendly, and frank. If you value your current suppliers, judge recruiters on their personal accomplishments, are not critical of motivation, and automate what you can over the web, the process doesn’t have to be painful.