How to fall in love with HR
The war for talent isn’t a new one and we’re all familiar with it. Candidates are controlling the market, recruiters are struggling to find skilled workers and HR departments are still tearing their hair out after being tasked with culture, employee engagement and retention, and all on a shoestring budget.
Things are only going to intensify and the struggle between agency recruitment and HR departments needs to inevitably come to an end. At the end of the day, we’re all looking for talent and figuring out how to engage candidates/employees. We’re actually fighting on the same side of the fence and there’s numerous ways your recruitment agency can start working effectively with HR.
1. Face the reality
Both parties are fighting against misplaced stereotypes and often it can lead to a defensiveness around certain areas. Whether we like it or not recruitment still tirelessly fights against ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ comparisons and cowboy consultants looking to make a quick buck, while HR managers are fighting equally hard against demeaning old and tired cat lady connotations. In all honesty, the business world hasn’t been overly kind to either of us, but as the space evolves and both sides add increasing value to the talent conversation, it’s clear to see that when working together those stereotypes will dissipate.
2. Face an even bigger reality
For all the clashes that can happen between frustrated recruiter and irritated HR, the reality of this situation is that HR departments are sitting on an incredible world of insights regarding the business and its growth strategy. Often, they are the gatekeepers of culture within the walls of the organisation and therefore can add extreme value to the recruitment process. Essentially, you’re both looking to build an engaged workforce with an incredible culture as opposed to high attrition rates and dissatisfied employees. There’s a huge amount of knowledge swapping to be done.
3. Culture trumps everything
In today’s workforce culture is the shinning crown of any company, if you manage to build a good one that is. For the not so lucky organisations out there, they’re striving to build a culture that will automatically attract and retain highly skilled workers. Recruitment agencies might not be sitting in on every strategy meeting, but the responsibility or culture falls as much on them as it does on HR. The sooner you can work together to start creating cultures you can all be proud of, the easier the whole talent game becomes.
4. Sharing is caring
Knowledge is power because it gives you the ability to make informed decisions. Thanks to big data and analytics tools, both agencies and HR have amassed huge amounts of data on their candidates, pools and markets. It’s a virtual gold mine of information that can benefit one another, so try sitting and sharing some of your insights with the HR department you’re working with. Your CRM already has valuable information that is golden to a HR professional. The aim is to consistently add value. Plus, consider big data the modern-day olive branch. Access Recruitment CRM stores data intelligently, integrates with other systems and draws up bespoke reporting keeping you and HR always in the know.
Whether we like it or not, HR and agencies need to, in fact must, get better at working with one another. Given the dark days ahead of us where candidates become even more scarce, things like culture and employer branding will matter ten times more to all of us.
Download our Agency Guide to Productivity: How marginal gains can increase profits and fuel growth.
