Most so-called “professional hiring agencies” are little more than clearing houses for lackluster resumés. Which is fine—if you want to read resumés all day, every day. But if you want to fill your backlog of open positions with high-value talent, you need a different approach.
Every industry has its hard-to-place roles. In IT, these are your cloud architects, DevOps engineers, and Generative AI & machine learning engineers. In engineering, these are your electrification and autonomy experts. In finance, these are financial analysts or risk managers.
These people aren’t submitting 50 job applications a day. They’re probably not even looking for new jobs. They’re too busy crushing it in their current roles. And they’ll keep doing that until someone comes along and offers something better.
Many staffing agencies just send resumé after resumé because that’s their recruiting strategy. On the other hand, successful professional recruitment agencies target high-value, passive candidates—and get different results. Here’s why you need the latter type of partnership.
In recruiting and staffing, “more” isn’t always better
No one can manage 100+ vendor relationships. It’s not possible. Which means these agencies you’ve “hired” don’t have the insight into your staffing needs to effectively serve you. Adding just one more won’t change that.
This is especially the case if you want to hire high-value professionals. Because these top candidates aren’t out there looking for jobs. In fact, it’s the opposite: top talent is incentivized to stay in their current roles.
For example, a large segment of Brightwing’s talent and client base is in the Detroit, Michigan, area, the beating heart of the automotive industry. General Motors (including Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buick, and GMC), Ford, J.D. Power—they’re all in our backyard.
And you can bet that they’re all competing for top automotive talent with every resource at their disposal. This is especially the case for talent with high-demand focuses like electrification, autonomy, AI, cybersecurity, etc.
Let’s assume you don’t have millions of dollars on hand to invest in talent acquisition. So what can you do to attract this talent?
Well, we can tell you what not to do—and that’s a bunch of transactional strategies that most people, especially high-performing professionals with busy lives, end up ignoring anyway:
- Automated outreach
- Canned messages (which in reality are just job postings in email)
- Rinse and repeat
Just doing this over and over again isn’t going to work. So if you use an employment staffing agency that follows this rote approach, you won’t make much headway—because odds are you won’t even connect with the right talent base.
What should you look for in a professional hiring agency?
1. Strategic partnership
Resumés aren’t the same as hires. If you have an agency that sends you 100 resumés but none of them materialize into placements, are they actually helping you?
Too many professional hiring agencies focus on outputs—how many emails they send, how many job postings they send out, how many resumés they bring in, etc. This is the exact wrong approach. Instead, you should be focusing on outcomes—actually delivering results and value to your organization.
When an agency focuses on outcomes over outputs, they’re able to be strategic and thoughtful in how they work for you. Which means you get some benefits a typical hiring agency may not offer.
One example we’ve seen in our experience is the integration of our hiring team with internal HR. An internal HR organization may be excellent at placing entry-level, more transactional roles, but is struggling to find specialized, hard-to-fill, highly technical and advanced talent. Where most companies will try to supplant the entire operation, a strategic partner (like Brightwing) will come in and find the weak points and focus on filling those.
2. Proactive discovery process
It’s impossible to figure out whether a candidate is “good” within a 15-minute phone call. So why do most recruiters use that method? Because they’re crunched for time, most likely. And, frankly, because too many recruiters see candidates as commodities, and don’t want to disqualify a bad fit and make themselves look bad.
But a quality professional hiring agency knows that deep understanding not only of candidates’ skills and background, but who they are as a person, is table stakes. So yes, it’s an investment on our part. But it’s the reason why we’re able to deliver outsized results for our clients.
We’ll use the Brightwing discovery process as an example. Any high quality professional hiring agency will follow a similar process:
- Understand candidate background, including past, present, and ideal job
- Identify what the recruiter is seeing in the market and share insights with the candidate
- Cross-referencing recruiting insights with what the candidate is seeing
- Understanding the recruiters’ previous self-submits, interviews, relationships with staffing companies, and other insight into their job search thus far
- Figuring out where they can help the candidate
When you look for a professional hiring agency, ask: what is the process you use to onboard and learn about your candidates? The shorter that process, the less likely they’ll be able to find what you’re looking for.
3. Constant feedback and communication
For those 100+ agencies we mentioned above, how many are you actually in regular contact with? Because if you never hear from them, they’re not going to do a good job for you.
Constant feedback and communication is critical for a professional hiring agency to attract the right candidates. If something isn’t working, you should be able to reach out, identify the mistake, and fix it going forward.
The inverse is also true. If you have an agency that stands by their process and track record of success, they’ll be able to tell you if you’re the problem—which can improve not only your relationship with that one agency but with other professional hiring agencies you employ.
This two-way street of communication is critical. Without it, misalignment happens, and friction between you and your agency hinders both sides’ ability to succeed.
4. Deep talent networks developed over time
When choosing a professional hiring agency, longevity is key. This is especially important given the world of post-pandemic recruitment upstarts—people who’ve been recruiters less than two years.
But no matter how talented or hard-working any one recruiter or agency may be, building genuine, trusting relationships with talent cannot happen overnight. It requires years of consistent communication and relationship-building—often without a single penny of commission.
The truth is: high-value talent isn’t in the job market very often. And if they’re truly in-demand, they’re in for a limited window. Our recruiters understand this. So they aren’t looking to force-fit a candidate into a role immediately. Instead, they want to be the first person that candidate calls when they’re ready to make a move.
Just hiring another professional hiring agency won’t work
If you just keep doing the same thing over and over again, you’ll keep getting the same results. If you truly want to place those positions that have been open for 6+ months, you need to try something different.
Everything we’ve talked about in this article is exactly what Brightwing does. Our recruiters have spent years (sometimes decades) building relationships in IT, engineering, financial services, and operations. If you want to place hard-to-reach talent, this team can help you find what you’re looking for.
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