(June 30, 2003) - Shirley Renner is one of our favorite regular readers. A seasoned Recruiting manager, when she disagrees with us, we listen.   On Friday, we said that "Strategic Partner" Recruiters were often less productive in quantitative terms but that their net contributions were immensely more powerful. She had this to say about the column:

Good recruiters who are "Strategic Partners" in the hire process have more productivity than administrative recruiters. The reason being is that the former understands the needs of the manager and little time is wasted talking to candidates who are a bad fit. A good Strategic Recruiter is able to CONTROL the process so that there are no candidate fall offs, timely interview scheduling and of course timely hire decisions. Hence, while their time is spent on less administrative detail, what they do spend their time on is fruitful.

A good example of this is that an administrative recruiter will screen 20 people whose resumes look like a fit and will more than likely submit at least 15 of them. Chances are that the hiring manager will reject most of the submittals and interview 3 (if any). A Strategic Partner will talk to five, submit 3, and the hiring manager will have a hard time deciding which one to hire. Submittal to interview ratios and interview to hire ratios give you a really separates the two types of recruiters.

Besides knowing what their hiring managers want, a Strategic Partner will know how to control the submittal to interview time and of course the interview to hiring decision time. This causes less "fall offs" because candidates are made offers in a timely fashion and little time is spent recruiting for the same position. It has been my experience, if you hire only permanent recruiters who can act autonomously to service managers, they will not only produce substantially more but the quality will be better.

Most old time HR mangers think an intern can do a recruiters job and there is no respect for the specialty. When they are introduced to this type of recruiting, they are amazed, that the quantity and quality of hires go up substantially, and the cost per hire goes down exponentially.