The Difference Between a Recruiting Agency and Strategic Talent Advisors

The case for finding great employees, not just anybody

You’ve done round after round of interviews with candidates. You’ve done background checks, talked to references. But you still don’t feel like any of the people being put in front of you would actually fit into the culture your company wants to build, or would someday make good promotions. And yet both the recruiting agency or freelance recruiter you’re using and your boss are pushing you to make a choice because you need someone to fill that empty role.

You’re about to make a bad hire.

You’re not alone, either: Only 19 percent of new hires are considered “successful,” according to Harvard Business Review, and 46 percent are considered “failures” at 18 months. Estimates vary on how much each bad hire costs, from 20 percent of their salary to 213 percent in the case of executives. And that’s just the monetary cost; there are all sorts of indirect costs, like lost productivity.

That kind of “I just need a body in here” thinking can cost you time and money, and, just as importantly, throw off the balance of that harmonious, productive culture you’re trying to nurture. But the talent acquisition process doesn’t have to work this way if you partner with a strategic talent advisor instead of a recruiter.

Every Open Position Has a Soul Mate

Both a strategic talent advisor and a recruiter are trying to acquire talent for you. The biggest difference, though, is that a strategic talent advisor actually spends the time to get to know your company as a whole — the culture, the leadership style, the values — to develop a strategy around hiring in addition to doing the work of candidate selection. The strategic talent advisor presents you with four to five candidates fully aligned with the company ethos, saving you the time and energy of wading through a pool of candidates.

A recruiter is transactional by nature: you give them parameters, they give you candidates, and when you hire one, they get paid, regardless of whether that candidate ends up in the aforementioned 19 percent of successful hires.

Accountability and Smarter, Better Hires

There is no accountability in this process with a recruiter — the resume grabber collects their check when a body is placed, and that’s it. While there is some incentive to provide candidates who at the least aren’t immediate flameouts, because too many ill-fitting candidates would mean losing a company’s business, the recruiter is still not a partner of any kind with a company.

Strategic talent advisors want to get under the hood of a company’s culture, to understand intrinsically what that culture requires from a talent perspective, and actually partner with HR and the company’s leadership team from the very beginning of the process — before searching for candidates, before even crafting a job posting — to provide a candidate pool stocked with actual talent. Think of it like stocking a pond with koi instead of goldfish from a carnival.

Diversity & Inclusion

Being strategic this early in the hiring process is crucial in the tech space. Tech as a whole has a massive diversity and inclusion problem, and after years of ineffective “fixes,” more companies are coming around to the idea that their diversity and inclusion efforts must start on the ground level. As in, “How do we word this job posting?” ground-level. “D&I” can no longer be tacked on — these elements must be integral to your company’s culture.

This leads us to the “original sin” of recruiting: presenting you with a candidate pool that sets up your company and your candidates for failure, particularly when it comes to those essential cultural elements of diversity and inclusion. You can tell a recruiter you want a diverse candidate pool, but that designation doesn’t bear much weight unless both the company and the recruiter agree on what “diverse” means: Are you thinking about gender, ethnic, and generational diversity? Is your talent acquisition specialist thinking about all of these facets of diversity?

Any Body Won’t Do

I don’t want to denigrate the entire field of regular recruiting. But one big problem with regular recruiters is that they tend to be resume grabbers, only looking for a specific set of skills to fill a role defined by a company that may not be thinking strategically about their talent. The recruiter is not paying attention to how a company as a whole functions, or what role a position plays in the larger company culture.

The more bodies these recruiters put in front of an interviewer, the more likely one of those bodies will be chosen, and they’ll get their check, regardless of whether that body will fall into that 19 percent of successful hires we talked about above.

You need someone who will do the work that brings your successful hiring rate way above that dismal 19 percent. What you need is a partner, not a resume-grabber; someone who understands your company’s culture and can craft a talent strategy to match. You need a strategic talent advisor.

V/G is a strategic talent search & development consultancy partnering with the world’s most renowned technology companies to help them find, retain and cultivate top talent in tech.