How we reduced our agency spend to zero

**Disclaimer: Ok before I start, this isn’t some braggy ‘look at how good we are’ type post, nor does it include any deep sourcing wizardry or big budget advertising spend. Nor is it an agency bashing post.

What this post is about is how, in the last two and a half-ish years, we have managed to recruit great tech talent, whilst at the same time reducing our agency spend to zero.

I hope you find it useful!

I’ve been a Talent Acquisition Partner at Shop Direct for around 2.5 years and during that time, whilst I’ve managed recruitment for most parts of the business, my core area and main area of responsibility has been all permanent IT recruitment in our Speke head office.

During the last 2.5 years our recruitment agency spend this area has been ￡0. At no point over the past couple of years did I set out to not use agency support to fill a role nor did I get stubborn or dig my heels in when a hiring manager wanted to go to agency, we just haven’t felt the need for that support.

I wanted to share with you how we achieved this, hopefully there may be something in here that somebody finds useful to try out.

Data & Storytelling

Have it and take it to every brief with a hiring manager, especially one you’ve never worked with before or haven’t worked with recently.

Before sitting down with a hiring manager, I’d always bring some data along with me. Nothing spectacular, nothing that isn’t quite easy to get nor takes a massive amount of time. Some insights from LinkedIn Recruiter that tells the story of what our potential candidate pool looks like, where they work, who we’re competing with for talent, where they live – all that good stuff.

Add to that market knowledge of who’s recruiting right now and you can share some real insights with the hiring manager before you even begin recruiting.

I found this instantly gave me a level of both credibility and trust with my hiring managers, it also helped to set their expectations in how long we thought it might take to find the right candidate.

If you share this data midway through a campaign or a couple of weeks after taking the brief then it may look like you’re coming up with excuses as to why you haven’t found any candidates yet. Do it at the very start and you’re setting expectations rather than making excuses.

Working with and upskilling Hiring Managers

Whilst most hiring managers have a vested interest in making sure a role is filled, it’s not their day job and recruitment is probably something they know very little about in terms of the detail.

It’s our job to educate them, it makes the entire process run more smoothly (although not always friction free!) and if they understand the part they need to play in the process to secure talent into their teams this really helps.

There’s a few ways I’ve tried that helped me with this – but one of the most effective is sourcing together. Spend an hour with your hiring manager, open LinkedIn Recruiter (or other search tools), run a search and sit and review profiles together. Not only will this be an eye opener to your hiring manager about how much work goes into a search, i.e. it’s not just a case of advertising and CV sift, but you’ll also get a deeper understanding of what they’re looking for as you review the profiles together.

Nailing what ‘good looks like’

This is where most recruitment processes fall flat or take longer than they need to, because hiring manager and recruiter aren’t aligned on what a good candidate looks like.

Most often this leads to a lot of wasted time in sourcing or interviewing candidates that “aren’t quite right”. I learned a couple of little tricks, quite early on in my time here that really helped me take that first brief from a hiring manager that got us much more aligned on what good likes like.

Trick No.1 – rather than asking the question(s) – “Who are we looking for?” or “What skills or experience do they need to have?”, I asked the question “What do you need this person to do?” and then followed up with questions like “Ok, to be able to do that part of the job of what skills/experience do they need? It sounds like that’s a very small part of the job, so would you say those skills are more of a nice to have and something they can learn when they’re here?”

Trick No.2 – question like a 5 year old. Anybody who has young kids will know what I mean.

               “Shut that door” – “Why?”

               “Don’t do that” – “Why?”

               “They need agile experience” – “Why?”

If a hiring manager can’t articulate why a certain ‘must have’ is important then it shouldn’t form part of the criteria.

I found this help dropped the number of items of the recruitment shopping list significantly without the hiring manager feeling like they’re sacrificing on quality.

Advertising

When I first started here I didn’t spend that much time trying to write good quality adverts, I’d whip something up in 10 minutes, advertise it and start sourcing and searching.

I’d hit a stumbling block with one of my roles and before deciding to go out to agency, I thought I’d give my advert a re-write first. I read a few articles on copywriting and watched a view videos and completely changed how I wrote my adverts. And it worked, quite quickly too.

I then realised how much I’d under estimated the power of a really well written job advert. It’s definitely worth spending the time upfront to write as good an advert as you can, a well written and engaging advert alongside sourcing really has really helped us to attract some great tech talent.

The Process

There’s little point in being able to attract some great talent into the business if the interview process is slow and the assessment isn’t fit for purpose. As recruiters, we’ve all lost candidates throughout a process at some point because they’ve been offered another role elsewhere and we took too long.

We decided to cut down our process where we could, if we had a two stage interview process and we felt we could reduce that down to a slightly longer one stage process, we did it.

If we were using the same assessment approach that we used 5 years ago, we re-looked at it and made sure it helped to assess those skills and behaviours we deemed as essential during the brief.

It’s amazing how often the wrong assessment approach can mean you rule out perfectly qualified candidate because you’re assessing the wrong things.

All of this helped us to reduce the recruitment lifecycle time, reduce the number of candidates who drop out in process and also make sure we’re assessing properly.

Referrals

We don’t have an official referral policy or programme, also we’re a big old business so it’s quite common that most people here don’t know what open vacancies we have unless they happen to be searching the internal careers site. This often means that referrals aren’t at the forefront of people’s minds.

We tried a few things in IT that really helped drive us to drive up referrals, but the one thing that had the biggest impact was simply making a bit of noise internally about the vacancies and making them more visible. Whether that’s having infographics or details of the roles on posters or screens around the building and asking for referrals, or having the vacancies announced during weekly briefings and daily stand-ups.

Making a bit of noise about the vacancies really helped to get us some top quality referrals from our current team members.

Deliver

All of the above has really helped us to reduce our agency spend in IT, but gaining your hiring managers trust, upskilling them and writing better quality adverts will only go so far. You still need to deliver great candidates and manage the process along the way.

For the first 12 months of my time here I was the only member the team looking after recruitment for IT and it was a struggle trying to do all of the above alone.

Luckily, we had a bit of a restructure of our own TA team about a year or so ago which meant we now had additional support in recruiting in IT. Without going into all the detail of how and why, there was now always at least two of us in the team working through the above across all our vacancies in IT. It also helps that the two guys who are supporting me are awesome recruiters.

As you can probably imagine, our cost per hire in IT has reduced massively, but also seen the time to hire decrease and the quality of hire increase.

Like I said at the top, the idea of this post wasn’t about self-promotion nor about bashing agencies, it was more about sharing some things that have worked for us here, in the hope it may be useful for my fellow recruiters.