Working with Recruitment Agencies

Recruiting new staff can feel a bit like a trip to the dentist: tedious, awkward, and something you only do when you absolutely have to. Add to this the fact that the majority of arts and culture organisations don’t have the luxury of an in-house HR team to turn to when a new vacancy arises, it’s easy to see why it’s tempting to outsource recruitment to an agency – if your organisation can afford to. But how can you ensure that working with a recruitment agency won’t negatively impact on your goals for equity and inclusion?

---

Short on time? Here’s the gist of it:

If you're working with an agency and want to make sure they can help you fulfil your equitable recruitment goals, you should:

1. Check their principles - find out what their values are when it comes to equity and inclusion

2. Check their practices - ask questions which reveal the specific processes they're using for candidate search, so you can be sure they're putting their money where their mouths are. (You can download our quick cheat sheet of questions to ask here.

3. Check their people - does their own workforce reflect diversity and inclusion?

---

We’ll readily confess that at Herd, we believe that the best and most affordable way to ensure your organisation fulfils its equity and inclusion goals is to train your staff in equitable recruitment practices that can be repeated and scaled. However, we also get that there might be times when working with a recruitment agency just makes the most sense when you consider the resources you’d need to fill a vacancy yourself.  If that’s the case and you’re either thinking about, or have already started working with a recruitment agency, then here are our top three tips for how to work with recruitment agencies and still ensure that your inclusive recruitment goals are met.

Tip number 1: Check the agency’s principles

If your arts organisation is serious about creating an inclusive and equitable workplace, the first thing you need to do if you’re going to work with a recruitment agency is check that the agency’s own mission and values align with yours.

A very quick and simple way to do this is to look at the agency’s website - do they talk about inclusivity, diversity and equity? Do they provide any insights or learnings about the ways in which this shapes their work? As well as looking at the website, make sure you speak to a member of their team and ask them specific questions about their approach. For example, what training have they had internally for their own staff? How do they stay up to date on current best practice? Which brings us on nicely to...

Tip number 2: Check their processes

The reality is that it’s really easy , (too easy, in fact), for companies to talk a good game when it comes to inclusion and diversity, but the real proof is very much in the pudding of their processes. Even with the best intentions, some recruitment agencies may not have the depth of understanding and expertise on the specific challenges faced by underrepresented groups to meet the unique needs and experiences of diverse candidates, so it’s really important that you do a bit of digging into the details behind their work.

When exploring the agency’s processes, there are two key questions you need to ask: Firstly, how do they source candidates, and secondly, how do they screen candidates?

When it comes to sourcing candidates, many recruiters will tell you that they have “an extensive database of high-quality candidates” to choose from. While this might sound appealing, knowing the volume of candidates that a recruiter holds doesn’t tell you how or where those candidates were sourced from. It used to be the case that recruiters relied heavily on in-person candidate attraction activities such as job fairs and networking events, or word-of-mouth referrals from existing networks which weren’t always particularly diverse. These channels have been largely replaced by online methods such as jobs boards and LinkedIn. LinkedIn in particular gives recruiters the opportunity to reach a very large number of prospective candidates, including passive candidates who wouldn’t necessarily have considered a role with your company otherwise. This can be particularly helpful if your inclusion strategy includes hearing from candidates who may have transferable skills from other sectors.

However, it’s important to remember that just because a recruiter can access lots of candidates, it doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll end up with a more diverse pool of applicants. Apart from the fact that passive candidates may need more persuasion about the role and your company, the model that most recruitment agencies work to means that they will generally default to candidates who already have a more established track record – after all, their ultimate aim is to find the candidate who is most likely to be appointed and earn them a fee, and that will typically mean putting forward candidates with more direct experience.

Equally, sourcing a diverse range of candidates won’t result in an equitable and inclusive process if the screening of those candidates isn’t done correctly. For example, most recruitment agencies still rely heavily on CVs as the first step in filtering candidates through the selection process, which in itself can be problematic as CVs often create a halo effect that results in the same types of candidates being put forward for roles. This issue is compounded by the fact that some agencies also use automated CV screening tools which are designed to look for specific key words and will only select candidates whose CVs make use of these. Although the primary purpose of these tools is simply to save time, automated application screening tools have been found to perpetuate biases so if the agency you’re looking to work with are making use of these, this would be an immediate red flag. 

Tip number 3: Check their people

If you’re working with an agency where there’s a reasonably large staff team, it’s worth finding out how much diversity is reflected within their own workforce. For this, we’d recommend having a conversation rather than just looking at the list of staff members on the agency’s website as there may be diversity within the team which isn’t immediately identifiable beyond the more obvious protected characteristics such as age, race and gender. If the agency’s staff base isn’t especially diverse at the moment this doesn’t necessarily mean that you shouldn’t work with them – as long as they can clearly articulate their own strategy for addressing this and demonstrate understanding of the issues within their organisation, you’re good to go. Of course, if they lack diversity and they can’t tell you what they plan to do about it, feel free to run a very swift mile in the opposite direction!

Tip number 4: Check your prerogative

As much as you need to scrutinise any recruiter or agency you might be working with, it’s also key that you and your organisation adhere to the standards that you’ve set. Whilst this might sound ridiculously obvious, we’ve come across cases where organisations have chosen to work with agencies to fulfil a vacancy, but have then independently selected their own candidate without following due process (usually in favour of someone they already knew). Aside from the inequity this creates for the candidates involved, it also creates an inequity for the agency, especially if their fee is based solely on a commission which is dependent on them being the ones to find the appointable candidate. If you want to be able to pride yourself on having a recruitment process which is truly equitable, the way that you work with other people involved in your selection process is just as important as the experience that you provide to candidates. 

Still keen to work with an agency? Download our cheat sheet of questions to ask a recruitment consultant to help make your recruitment inclusive.