A shortlist only has value when the candidates on it suit the role you actually need filled. If you need to choose a recruitment agency in Australia, the important variable is what happens between taking your brief and submitting candidates. Your recruitment process accountability affects the time your team spends interviewing and the quality of the eventual appointment. Working with The Recruitment People puts those selection decisions into a measurable recruitment process.
A recruiter can send you five candidates within days and still leave you doing most of the selection work yourself. When you choose a recruitment agency in Australia, look closely at how the agency decides which candidates deserve your time. At The Recruitment People, we measure our recruitment performance and assess the person behind the CV because qualifications alone do not tell us how somebody will perform inside your business.
Recruitment Agency Selection Criteria
Your brief gives a recruiter the job requirements, but effective recruitment requires deeper interpretation. A sales candidate who has sold into your industry may come from a consultative six-month sales cycle while your role requires high-volume prospecting and weekly activity targets. Similar experience does not make those working environments interchangeable.
Useful recruitment agency selection criteria therefore expose what happens inside the recruitment process:
- Ask how the recruiter tests the brief against the available candidate market.
- Establish how working style, personality and company culture are assessed.
- Ask what proportion of submitted candidates progress to interview and offer.
- Check whether retention forms part of the agency’s performance measurement.
Australian Government guidance for hiring employees recommends defining the role and selection criteria, evaluating applications against those criteria and interviewing shortlisted candidates. A recruiter taking responsibility for part of that process needs to understand those criteria well enough to screen candidates meaningfully.
Role and Workplace Fit
The job title tells us only part of what somebody will be walking into. Reporting lines, management style, sales structure, pace of work and the amount of autonomy attached to a role affect which candidate will function well in it.
That is why our permanent recruitment process examines culture and role fit alongside skills and experience. The same principle applies when you ask how recruitment agencies assess candidate fit. A strong recruiter needs enough understanding of your working environment to recognise where a technically capable candidate is likely to perform well and where the fit is wrong.
Recruitment Performance Measures
Candidate volume is easy to report. Candidate quality metrics tell you considerably more about the work behind the shortlist.
We track time to fill, candidates submitted, submitted-to-interview conversion, submitted-to-offer conversion and retention. Those numbers expose weak screening because a stream of submitted CVs with poor interview conversion is still a poor result.
If you are looking for the best recruitment agency for employers, ask what happens to the candidates after submission. What should employers look for in a recruitment agency ultimately comes back to the quality of the selection decisions being made on your behalf and the evidence available to test them.
Speak with The Recruitment People when you choose a recruitment agency in Australia.