When you’re deciding which recruitment agency to work with, it’s natural to start with questions about the firm itself: how big is it, how long has it been around, how many placements does it make in a year. They feel like the right questions. They’re also the easiest ones for any recruiter to answer well, regardless of whether they’re actually good at the job.
I’ve been at Cox Purtell a bit over two years now, and I recently went back through my own placement record rather than relying on gut feel about how it’s gone. Doing that properly – with the caveats a two-year sample deserves – left me with a much better question for any hiring manager to be asking, and it isn’t about the agency at all.
A relationship with an agency is really a relationship with a person
More than half of the clients I’ve placed into over these two years are ones I’d still call strong or solid enough to pick up the phone to today. For a book built over two years, that’s a decent sign the relationships are outlasting the individual placements.
Four of the strongest client relationships in my current book didn’t start when I joined Cox Purtell either. They were relationships I’d already built before the move, and they came with me and kept growing. Other relationships built entirely in the last two years are already among the most active on my list.
Both of those facts point to the same thing: the agency’s name on the invoice matters far less than most hiring managers assume. What actually gets you a good outcome is whether the individual person handling your search understood the brief, found the right people, and was straight with you when a search wasn’t going well. That’s a quality of the consultant, not the company they happen to sit inside.
The number that matters more than “how many placements”
If the agency isn’t the right thing to interrogate, the volume of placements it’s made isn’t either. Retention is the number worth asking about – specifically, retention once you strip out anything too recent to have been properly tested.
Over two years at Cox Purtell, I’ve made 37 placements across 18 clients: 30 permanent and 7 contract. Of the 30 permanent placements, 26 are still in role – 86.7%. I’d be cautious reading that as a settled figure rather than an early one: these are all recent placements, the oldest a little over two years old, and while most bad fits show up well before that mark, it hasn’t been tested by the longer time horizon that really proves a hire was the right long-term fit.
For that longer view, I looked back across my placements in Australia over the past eight-plus years: retention there sits at 36.5%, which is still comfortably ahead of typical market benchmarks. That’s the number that’s actually been tested, and it’s the kind of figure a good recruiter should be willing to share rather than deflect.
Three questions to ask before you commit
Next time you’re choosing between recruitment agencies, try asking the consultant directly:
• How long have you personally been doing this – not how long has the agency existed?
• What’s your retention rate once you exclude anything too recent to have been properly tested?
• Do clients you placed into three, five, or eight years ago still take your calls?
These are harder questions to dodge than “how many placements has your firm made,” and they tend to get you a far more honest answer about who you’d actually be working with.
