Optimising the relationship between talent teams

Having worked in various recruitment agencies over the years, I have been involved in building many relationships.

Some of these have remained strong and some have changed or fizzled depending on changing clients' needs but what I have noticed is the best relationships are based on a partnership. A mutual understanding of each other’s worth and value, which in turn makes both parties successful. I believe this all starts with investing in the relationship. Like you would with a friendship or a partner, a professional relationship is no different – so why do they often feel so transactional in recruitment?

I recently joined Ambition as the new Client Engagement Director to work specifically on client service and strategy, to build partnerships with like-minded organisations and invest in those relationships further.

Investing in relationships

To understand the need, I must first explain how the majority of recruitment agencies work. In the most common model, a consultant’s role will comprise of a variety of tasks, most of which will not result in a direct fee. Fees are only paid (most of the time) when a role has been filled. Even the best recruiters in the market would not forecast filling more than one of every two jobs they work on. This means that to ensure recruitment costs are covered fees remain high and sometimes it can feel like time is limited.

Suppose we can find a way to reduce ‘wastage’ when it comes to a consultant's time and to work solely with businesses who see us as a true partner, a consultant may then have to work fewer roles at any one time to see the same return in fee value, meaning a more constructive relationship with more time truly understanding a clients needs, culture and ultimately enhancing the quality of profiles the company may receive based on a specific brief.

A true recruitment partner should be seen as an extension of your business, additional marketing for your company and your voice in the market. If this is done wrong there is even the potential your brand could become damaged.

Client Engagement Director

As Client Engagement Director my role is to optimise the relationships we currently have, to provide valuable data and insights and to truly understand our client’s needs. This in turn allows us to create space for more innovative and tailored conversations around the standard recruitment model and developing the right value adds to our service, ultimately resulting in stronger partnerships and a win-win situation.

I also feel it's important to shine transparency on what we offer including some things that the majority of businesses may not be aware of.

Market Insights – what does this mean?

Part of my role as Client Engagement Director is to provide you with analytics on an almost limitless level. When I tell clients this, their first question is always “How much will that cost me?” but we see this as part of the service, so these insights are free of charge.

We pair market knowledge with a variety of data tools to break down the market into tailored analytics for your organisation. This can include the standard salary benchmarking and job flow numbers but can also be used to make strategic decisions across the business. Some of the insights we can provide (but not limited to) are:

Gender diversity splits
Reconciliation action plans
What competitors you are losing employees to and gaining from
Skillsets you are struggling to retain and why
Alternative skillsets and where to find them
Salary, location, experience and any other demographic information

It is more common that recruitment partners are engaged after the roles are defined but by utilising this data with an effective specialist recruitment partner and bringing them into the process earlier to help triage the role, requirements can be more accurately aligned with the market and solution to the problem that you are trying to solve.

Snowball effect

Focusing on investing in a partnership over providing a transactional service is a win-win situation. The closer we work with your business, the better we understand your needs and culture, and the more effective we are in finding the right people, the more successful hires you make and the more placements we make.

The snowball effect – what makes you successful, makes us successful.

If you are interested in any of the above or would like tailored analytics and insights for your business (completely free of charge) then contact our team of experts today.