According to Jeremy Eskenazi, writing for ere.net, "Historically, there hasn't been a lot of trust and respect between HR/staffing professionals and TPRs [third-party recruiters]." This has mostly been because of the fact that HR employees and TPRs are working toward the same goals. This has led some on both sides to view this relationship as competitive, rather than as an opportunity to form a fruitful collaborative partnership. However, in order to best meet a company's recruitment goals, HR and third-party recruiters must be on the same page, working together rather than competing.
The first important step in this process is for HR to make it clear to the TPR what the company's current and long-term executive staffing needs actually are. That way, the third-party firm can make an educated guess as to the volume and timeframe of work they'll be taking on by teaming up with you. You also need to have a clear job description and list of desired qualities ready so that the executive search firm has something concrete to work with when investigating potential candidates.
Secondly, to avoid repeating problems that your company has had with recruiting in the past, it can be helpful to provide the third-party firm with any recruiting analytics and data your company has on record. This can also include performance evaluations of previous employees who didn't end up staying with the company, allowing the recruiting firm to rule out candidates with personal characteristics that might present a problem for an employee in your organization.
Finding people is easy, but finding the RIGHT people is not. YES Partners helps companies FIND the right people – for all company functions, across many industries and globally.
