How to Hire the Wrong Employment Staffing Agency

No, that’s not a typo. If you follow the four steps listed below, the next employment staffing agency you hire will certainly underperform.

Most hiring managers know this pain all too well. It’s the reason they end up with 100+ agencies in their back pocket. Because each one, at some point, has failed to meet expectations, resulting in:

• Business-critical roles left open for 6-12 months
• Accrued overtime as your team fills in the gaps
• Delayed projects and slow revenue pipelines
• Failure to meet dependencies that ripple out to hurt the rest of the business

If those sound familiar, it’s probably because you’ve made or are currently making one of these mistakes.

But here’s the good news: if you just do the opposite, you’ll hire an employment staffing agency that doesn’t send you resumés. Instead, they’ll make quality placements happen.

Why is it so easy to hire the wrong employment staffing agency?

Hiring quality talent is harder than ever. According to ManpowerGroup, 70% of U.S. employers are struggling to fill positions. The top reason: they can’t find people with the necessary skills—both hard and soft.

At first blush, this may seem surprising. According to JPMorgan, the job market is growing at its slowest rate since January 2021. What’s more, the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that unemployment has increased over the last two years. So with fewer jobs and more job seekers, it should be easier to fill positions, right?

It depends on how you look at it. A recent Gartner study shows record increases in HR investments—including in compensation, training & development, and leadership development. In other words, organizations are invested in retaining their top talent. From what we’ve seen, it’s working. So if you want high performers, you should prioritize these passive job seekers.

But that’s the opposite of what most staffing agencies are built to do. If you go with one of the typical players, you may get resumés, but won’t find high-performing candidates to fill those roles.

Instead, you need an employment staffing agency that does things differently:

• Knows your industry and job requirements (hard and soft skills)
• Works to understand your staffing needs and form a true partnership
• Has a deep talent pipeline to draw from—they’re not just posting and emailing jobs to cold lists
• Matches your culture and can attract talent who will do the same
• Stands by their process and is willing to say “no” when they know something isn’t feasible

What are common mistakes when hiring an employment staffing agency?

As you hire another employment staffing agency, don’t make the same mistakes that put you here in the first place. Instead, go against the grain and try something different. Here are the four biggest mistakes to watch out for.

1. Going with the lowest rate

Sure, you want to do due diligence and make sure you’re not spending dollars unnecessarily. But going with the lowest rate, ironically, is costly.

In our experience, if you’re not willing to pay the industry standard, you’re not going to get the results you want. In fact, paying anything less will most likely end up with an offshore staffing solution. 

Let’s use an example from our Dallas-Fort Worth office. In recent years, many major technology companies have relocated their headquarters here. So if you’re competing against Microsoft, Salesforce, Intuit, Texas Instruments, AT&T, etc., do you really think you can skimp on talent acquisition?

And consider this: as long as your business-critical roles remain open, you’re slowing growth and stagnating your pipeline. By putting a little bit upfront to hire a competitive, effective employment staffing agency, you’re almost sure to make back those dollars in business growth.

2. Hiring a generic, non-industry specific agency

Every industry has its own priorities, interests, and trends. Highly technical industries—engineering, automotive, finance, operations, etc.—have them in spades.

Top candidates who are deeply immersed in these industries have a strong B.S. meter. They know when someone is pretending to know the industry, but in reality they don’t. If recruiters don’t have the necessary industry experience, they’re going to get fewer callbacks.

One way to test an employment staffing agency’s industry experience is to look at recruiter tenure. At Brightwing, our recruiters have above-average tenure compared to their peers. They’ve put in the time to learn their industry, build relationships, and develop authentic connections within it. That’s why our candidates trust and respect them.

3. Hiring a transactional recruiting firm

A typical employment staffing agency will just flood your inbox with resumés—and they think they’re doing you a favor.

In reality, now you have to sift through hundreds of pages and figure out which candidates to interview—which is what you hired the agency to do in the first place.

This is just one example of how transactional staffing agencies have become. Landing top talent requires a more strategic approach. And a winning staffing firm will understand that:

• Going beyond the hard and soft skills to understand what a successful hire looks like
• Building a plan to fill not just your immediate placement needs, but the next 10, 20, and 30 down the line
• Creating a strategy that identifies the right employment category for the role (e.g. full-time perm vs. contractor)

4. Not asking about your agency’s talent pipeline

As mentioned above, most top performers aren’t looking for work. Their employers have offered them plenty of incentives to stay where they are.

So if you want to nab them, you need an “in.” Transactional recruiters don’t offer that. Instead, find talent experts who’ve put in the time, effort, and patience to build relationships with their top talent.

I’ll be blunt: most staffing agencies don’t do this. Mainly because it takes a lot of time and resources—with no guarantee of success. But that’s the reason an employment staffing agency like Brightwing can get callbacks from passive talent and open doors that for most agencies are locked shut.

Is it worth it to hire an employment staffing agency?

So we’ve told you how to hire the wrong employment staffing agency. Now, just do the opposite of those four steps, and you’ll hire the right one.

Brightwing prides itself on being different from the competition. Although we’re a bit pricier than the transactional agencies, we offer deep experience in our target industries, talent pipelines that our recruiters have spent years building, and work to build strategic partnerships with all our clients. If you’re ready to stop wasting time with the wrong employment staffing agency and want to start building or rebuilding your talent base, contact us and let’s see if we’re a good fit.