Some questions to ask a recruiter...

10 Questions to ask a recruitment agent…

Before giving you the questions (and in fact there are more than 10!), I should point out a few important points:

Firstly, I work for an HR consultancy based in Manchester which offers recruitment as part of its services. However, the way in which we offer recruitment differs greatly, in many ways, from other recruiters in the market place, and in suggesting these questions I am also giving ‘our’ answers. These are in italics after each question. The questions are designed as a way of us explaining the differences between ourselves and mainstream recruiters.

Secondly, I have worked in what I would call ‘mainstream’ recruitment myself, for a great company, and all of these questions are ones that other recruiters have told me that they have been asked in one form or another.

Thirdly, I know some fantastic recruiters who are a credit to the industry and work hard to produce great results for their clients, and I am not suggesting that all recruiters will struggle with these questions.

Lastly, I hope you feel that all of these are perfectly fair questions to ask, they are not designed to ‘pick a fight’ with a recruiter, instead they should help you get the best service and value for money from them. They were put together as a light hearted exercise to help us explain the way that we operate.

So, in no particular order, here are the questions…


1) How much, in money terms not percentage terms, is your fee?
Most recruiters will not want to talk fees at the start of your dealings with them, and when they do, will generally prefer to talk in percentages, rather than actual amounts, possibly because these are less tangible. It is also worth noting that, by quoting a percentage fee, should you end up offering a candidate a higher salary than you initially expected, the fee that the recruiter charges can also increase. Alongside this, be aware that recruiter percentage fees are often based on basic salary PLUS car allowance or an additional amount if the role includes a car.

We do not charge placement fees. Our recruitment work, as with much professional consultancy work, is charged by the hour.

2) How much time do you expect to work on this role?
It may seem like a great result to get an ideal candidate’s CV from a recruiter the day after you have given them the assignment, but if you think about the actual amount of work that they have done in the meantime, which may be as little as one phone call to a candidate to check if they are interested in your role, then the fee you are paying can be put into context. It is worthwhile noting that, in explaining the fees charged, most recruiters will talk about the value of the candidate to your business, rather than the value of the work that they have done.

Prior to the commencement of any recruitment project, we provide a written proposal detailing the amount of hours we expect to work on your role, and what that time will be spent doing (advert creation, response management, first interviewing, behavioural profiling, reference and qualification checking etc). If we are able to find your ideal candidate in less than the quoted number of hours, then the invoice you receive from us will only be for the hours we actually worked. If the time taken is longer than the quoted number of hours, then the invoice will be capped at the number of hours on the original proposal.

3) So therefore your hourly rate is what?
Taking the fee divided by the number of hours gives you an hourly rate. For you own benefit, compare this against what you are charged by a solicitor, accountant or other professional. The results are generally interesting to say the least.

Our hourly rates are, by the above calculation method, extremely competitive and in the vast majority of cases significantly lower than standard recruitment. We expect to offer a proposal that is around 40% lower than you would expect to pay a recruiter.


4) If you advertise this role in the media, would you put our company name on it? If not, why not?
Most recruiters will advertise your role in relevant press and media. These ads are often multi-role ads with very little information about the company or the role. They will usually not include your company name, the simple reason being that they do not want to alert other recruiters to the fact that your company has a role. Why is this? Possibly because other recruiters may have better candidates and they have no desire to alert other recruiters to the fact that you are recruiting?

Unless the client specifies, we always advertise a role with the clients name included, in fact our adverts are normally designed to match the clients logo and branding requirements so that it looks more like an advert placed directly by the client rather than ourselves. We work to attract candidates who are motivated to work for your company, therefore produce adverts that highlight the reasons why someone would want to work for you. It should also be stressed that most recruiters do not re-charge advertising costs to clients, whereas we do, but even allowing for this, the cost of working with ourselves is normally significantly lower than with mainstream recruiters.

5) If we offer the position to one of your candidates, and also decide that one of your other candidates is suitable for a different role with us, would you charge a fee for that second candidate even though you have done no extra work?
With standard recruitment agency practise, where fees are charged for the introduction of a candidate to a client, the answer to this would be yes.

As we work on an hourly basis, if a client decides to offer positions to 2 candidates, there can be no extra charge from ourselves for this, unless the client decides that they would like us to carry out additional interviewing and/or testing for the second candidate, in which case this will utilise hours from our proposed amount.

6) How many candidates are on your database? And how many of these have you met in the past 6 months?
The first question should not make the recruiter uncomfortable; in fact many recruiters will be happy to tell you about the size of their candidate database. The second question is the more pertinent one. A database of 10,000 candidates sounds good, but if the majority of those have not been contacted, let alone interviewed, for a significant period of time, then the suitability of those candidates cannot be assessed.

Although we have a database of candidates, we operate by attracting motivated candidates to your role, rather than contacting potentially suitable people and ‘selling’ the role to them. Therefore the people we interview for your role have proactively and specifically expressed an interest in it, rather than being approached by a recruiter at a time when they may not even be looking for a new position and therefore more likely to withdraw from your recruitment process

7) Would you carry out a full face to face interview, specifically with regard to our role, prior to sending a candidate to us?
Most recruiters carry out registration interviews, where they will talk to a candidate, either over the telephone or face to face, to gain an understanding of their background and the positions that they are interested in. These are general interviews rather than in relation to a specific role. When they want to talk to a candidate about a specific role, this is often a necessarily brief telephone conversation rather than an interview. (Necessarily brief partly because recruiters need to submit CV’s as soon as possible in order to ‘claim’ a candidate who may be registered with more than one agency). In some cases, a recruiter will interview a candidate about a specific role face to face.

In the vast majority of our assignments we will carry out a full first interview with candidates solely and specifically in relation to that client’s role. Notes of this interview are taken and passed to the client for any candidate who they are to second interview.

8) What interview/selection training and experience have you personally had?
Most recruiters receive a significant amount of training in the sales skills required for the role. These are the skills required to market roles to candidates, candidates to clients and the recruiter’s services to clients. Some recruitment businesses also train their people in the art of interviewing and in the selection of candidates for roles, however many do not.

At The Urquhart Partnership our recruiters are experienced, HR people, not sales people. We do not train our recruiters in any form of sales skills, instead we focus on the skills required to gain a real understanding of both the client’s requirements and offering, and the candidates requirements and offering, thus ensuring that we present only those candidates who are a close match AND who are genuinely interested in the role.

9) Would you consider sending candidates details to another potential client at the same time as they are involved in a recruitment process with us?
Generally the answer to this would be yes, as getting a candidate in front of as many clients as possible increases the chances of successfully placing the candidate. Unfortunately, this will mean that you are competing with other clients for that candidates service which could lead to the candidate pulling out of your process, or increasing their salary demands.

As our candidates mainly initially apply for a specific, advertised role, we will not forward details of those candidates to any other client until the initial role has been filled. If a candidate wishes to apply for 2 different roles with us, then of course they will be interviewed, separately, for each of those roles.

10) Will you earn commission if you fill this role?

It is worthwhile remembering that mainstream recruitment is a sales business, and as such recruiters earn potentially very high commission. The motivation to fill a role can therefore be money, rather than achieving customer service excellence, although of course the two can go hand in hand.

We do not pay commission to our recruiters, although we do reward excellent performance through annual pay reviews.

11) Do you offer behavioural testing of candidates as part of your service?

Some recruiters will, some won’t, but those that do may charge an extra amount for it.

We offer a range of behavioural and psychometric testing and as part of our ‘no-placement fee’ recruitment offering, include Belbin Team Role profiling on all selected candidates at no extra cost. We are focused on sourcing and selecting candidates who are a match for the client and role BOTH in terms of skills/knowledge/experience and in their behaviours and personality. We do this by working hard to understand client needs and using CV’s, our interview skills and behavioural profiling.

What makes a great team...?

Some teams perform really well. They have that magic ingredient that means that the tasks and work get done, to a high standard, and on time. Usually this magic ingredient also delivers enjoyment of the work and of being in the team for the members also, and it makes the team a happy, successful and vibrant place to be.
Some teams do not perform quite so well. They have disagreements, problems, misunderstandings, breakdowns in communication and those wonderful things we all call 'personality clashes'. They are not the nicest of teams to be in, and the work that they produce may not be of the required standard, may be late in arriving, and may not justify the pain and negativity that has taken place to get the work done.
Why is this? Is there really a magic ingredient that makes some teams do well and others fail? Of course not. Sometimes it is down to luck, sometimes experience of who works well together, and sometimes it is the result of careful planning. The good news is that the careful planning involved is neither long-winded nor complex.
When you are putting together a team of people, whether for a short-term project or to work together in the long term, understanding the people involved, and their ability to work together, is key in gaining success for that team. More specifically, it is not just understanding the people, it is understanding how they work as part of a team that really matters. Any team needs 'ideas people', people who 'do', people who will give a logic check, people who will keep an eye on time scales and quality and many other types of people to succeed. The great thing is that most of us can naturally fulfil various different roles in a team, so we don't need to have teams of many people to get it right. Identifying the different roles that people will naturally take on, and making sure that all necessary roles are covered, is the way to ensure a winning team.
If you get the balance of people right, your team will 'fly' and produce great results for you. Get it wrong, and the trail of destruction will be visible for all to see....