If you’ve been getting consistently unsatisfactory results from your contingency marketing recruiters, don’t expect that to change any time soon. Their search model simply isn’t optimal when you need quality talent that’s a strong fit for your skill needs and company culture.
The Costs of Uncertainty
Contingency firms never know where their next paycheck is coming from.
- They don’t know how reliable your interest in the job is or whether you’ll drop the opportunity at any time.
- They don’t know how many other agencies they’re competing against that could win your business first.
A contingency recruiter can’t afford to spend too much time devoted entirely to one sensitive job because at any moment it could disappear and all that effort would go to waste.
In order to maintain financial stability, they are forced to take on an abundance of searches from as many clients as possible. At a standard contingency firm, each of the marketing recruiters might be juggling 25-30 jobs at any given time. By keeping their eggs divided into a high ratio of baskets, they can save enough to make an omelet even if they drop or lose the majority of them.
Of course, when the egg getting cracked is the future of your marketing success, it hurts you a lot more than it hurts them.
Fixing Problems with More Problems
So what do you do now that you’re not satisfied with your recruiter? When they’re not satisfied with their initial recruiting results, many companies actually go and contact even more contingency marketing recruiters, hoping that eventually one of them will turn up something worthwhile. This just results in more of the same mess. But now you also have half a dozen agency contacts emailing you every day and turned-off candidates wondering why three or four people different people called them about one job, damaging your employment brand.
Once you’ve enlisted multiple contingency recruiters, you’ve really opened a can of worms. In order to get top talent you need to be in regular contact to answer questions, monitor progress and discuss candidates. This is difficult enough with a single recruiter—communicating with several of them on a regular basis is downright overwhelming.
Do you really have time for that on your busy schedule?
Contingency Can’t Provide Quality
Because they have to diversify their options and are constantly on the clock to present a candidate before the other guy across town, you can never be sure you’re getting properly vetted, relevant job candidates. This is especially true if you have very specific, high-demand needs and require a hire from the top talent pool—mostly people who are currently employed and not actively looking for a job.
Contingency recruiters, by definition of how they get paid, must focus on low-hanging jobs and fill them with easy-to-contact candidates. They do not have the time it takes to properly engage with top-tier players who are already happy in their current role. There is simply no way to economically direct source candidates for every search when you perpetually have more than 20 of them on your plate. The jobs contingent recruiters perceive as difficult or do not understand get put on the backburner and may never get the attention you deserve.
When relying on contingency searches, you find yourself in a constant, expensive cycle of mediocre talent:
- Identify a need
- Contact recruiters
- Get presented lackluster talent
- Hire an underqualified candidate
- Realize over the course of several months that the hire can’t keep up with the demands of the job
- Repeat
Over that time, what return are you really getting on the investment you are making in search fees and training of the new marketing professional? What is the opportunity cost to your business if you had hired an “A” player the first time around?
Performance-Based Retained Marketing Recruiters Improve Your ROI
When you need exceptional marketing talent now, you can’t afford to go through multiple rounds of hiring the wrong person. Instead, you can save time and money in both the long and short term by choosing a performance-based retained marketing recruitment firm for your marketing talent acquisition needs.
When you need the best people working with you, and you need them quickly, the retainer model works better for both yourself and the recruiter. You invest a portion of the recruitment fee upfront so we can be reassured that you’re committed to hiring an “A” player. We can then confidently devote time and resources into understanding the nature of the job and your company and finding quality candidates that are strong matches.
That’s why, at any given time, our marketing recruiters are only working on a handful of searches. Instead of being thinly spread across dozens of jobs and hundreds of candidates, we can focus our efforts on just a few projects to ensure quality. And we’ll work hard to match you with great candidates, because we only get the rest of our fee when your A player starts working.
Instead of scrambling to put a warm body in front of you before the guy across town does, we can quickly present highly qualified talent when you need it. You won’t have to waste time interviewing the wrong people or answering a deluge of emails from an army of needy recruiters.
