🚩 Recruiting Agency Comments on Your Business… Is it a red flag?

We continue to share our vision of how to work with a great recruiting agency, including the red and green flags to watch out for. Our opinion is based on our experience as an agency and our clients’ feedback.

Earlier we elaborated on why an agency asks many questions during the briefing meeting before searching for a candidate. In our experience, deep questions help find the person to best reach your business goals. But there is one important caveat.

🚩 Red flag: The agency asks a lot of questions but gives few answers. By “answers,” we mean substantive feedback during the briefing.

✅ Green flag: It’s helpful if you receive expert feedback after answering the agency’s questions. For example, the agency can highlight problems that slow down effective hiring in your company.

✅ Green flag: The agency’s expert consultant helps you create a more realistic candidate profile. Here’s a couple of examples from NEWHR experts.

Olga Makarova, an executive search consultant:

A startup in the early stages sometimes comes to us and asks us to find a CTO with experience leading 500+ people. But in the early stages of a startup, you rarely need such an experienced manager, even if you plan to grow to that size in a few years.

After all, the larger the company, the more the technical manager’s competencies will shift towards strategy, process management, and people. In startups, there are small teams (so you don’t need to build complex processes at the beginning) and it’s important to be able to work with your hands. Often, CTOs in such teams are technical leaders who spend up to 50% of their time writing code or doing code reviews.

Oksana Prutyanova, the head of the search for analysts and data scientists:

A company came to us with a vacancy for a head of analytics. During the briefing, it turned out that his main task at first would be to set up the analytics system itself, and then only deal with manual, applied tasks that can be easily handled by a mid-level specialist.

We suggested not wasting time and a huge budget on attracting such a high-level manager, but rather inviting such a person on a contract basis to build processes and possible strategic tasks. And to hire a technical specialist to work with him.

💙 NEWHR Recruiting can help you to hire the best talent in tech. Just leave a request on our website or write to us at contact@new.hr