Contingency Recruitment Cycle

Promote your services

Your tasks here are:

• Get in contact with the right person, this often a cold call
• Form a relationship whereby they feel comfortable discussing their business with you
• Persuade them you can find good candidates for their vacancies
• Get their consent to find candidates for them at a mutually agreeable fee
  
  

The contingency recruitment cycle process

Source and select candidates

Remember, you will only earn your fee if you can supply the CV of the best candidate before your competitors. Sources to find your candidates can include:

• Online/media/press advertising response
• Internal candidate database
• Online CV databases (e.g. Monster etc)
• Networking candidates already in work to find out who they know who might be interested

When you contact potential candidates, you will be promoting your client and the job opportunity. Once you have sourced candidates, you need to put them through a selection process, comparing their skills, experience, knowledge, and attributes against the client's job description. This will be through telephone and/or face-to-face interviews.

Once you have decided that a candidate is good for the role, you will give them more information about the job and the client, making sure you are presenting the role in the best possible way to get the candidate's interest and commitment to interview.

Presenting candidates and arranging interviews

You need to present suitable candidates to the client (usually over email with a CV attached), highlighting the relevant strengths the candidate possesses. You want the client to look at the CV in a positive light and be interested right from the start.

If you haven't had any feedback, you will contact the client a day or so after submission, re-selling why you believe the candidate to be suitable, and pushing for a positive decision on whether or not to interview.

You should know by now when the candidate is available and whether they have other outstanding applications. Therefore if the client agrees to interview you can give them this information so they can arrange a time you know is convenient for the candidate.

Supporting the client and candidate through interview process

More often than not the interview process is more than one stage. At each stage you need to ascertain commitment from both sides.
The candidate and client have two different sets of needs, which occasionally conflict. How you balance them depends on how well you have gleaned as much information as you can from both parties, and how you use that information.

Other factors that are vital to know throughout the process include:

• Client's interview process
• Other interviews the candidate is currently attending
• Candidate's motivators apart from money
• Personal preferences of the interviewer(s)
• Time-frames of each party
  
  

Presenting the offer and getting candidate's acceptance

Hopefully if you've got the preceding stages right, you will have a job offer for your candidate. Now you need to present the offer in a positive light, comparing with the candidate's initial requirements (which should have been met or exceeded). Again, if you have done everything else right, there should be no reason why the offer is not accepted.

Stay in touch until the start date

Good candidates can often be contacted by your competitors about other job propositions. Therefore it is vital that you stay in touch with your candidate regularly until they actually start, so that you can constantly re-sell the opportunity that they (and you) have worked hard to earn!

Only when the candidate starts can you bill the client for your services and the deal is completed.