Working with a recruitment agency can save you a huge amount of time in your search for a perfect employee - we’ve got the resources, expertise and time to match you with someone who will fit seamlessly into your organisation and, at Anderson Hoare, we have over 25 years of experience doing so. Of course, no one knows your organisation as well as you do, but a successful relationship with a good recruitment agency can add a huge amount of value to your in-house hiring team.

Our founder, Diana, has spent her entire career working in recruitment and her industry knowledge and experience is second to none. Below, she’s shared her advice and top tips on how best to work with us to ensure that you get the most from our partnership.

Spend time with us up front We’ll be able to start our search as quickly and thoroughly as possible if we get a deep understanding of your brief. When we come in to see you show us around and let us get a good feel for the office environment, we can use this knowledge to form a better opinion of the kind of person that would fit in. It also helps if you have a list of qualifications, skills and attributes that your new employee should possess, we can go through these and more subjective qualities with you in detail, spending time discussing them to ensure we understand your brief exactly. Don’t worry about how random or seemingly inconsequential some of these attributes might seem – we like a challenge and it’s our job to take your brief and match it with someone that ticks all the boxes.

Keep in touch We understand that businesses evolve over time – and so will the kind of employees you want to hire. Stay in touch with us and get us back in every six months or so to enable us to refresh our knowledge of the office environment and how your ways of working or business structure might have changed. This is really important, it means we can brief candidates accurately about the kind of company you are and send you candidates with qualities and skills that fit the culture you are moving towards, rather than how your business used to feel and act.

Don’t ask for a shortlist upfront When we first speak to new clients on the phone many will ask us to send over a shortlist of CVs before we’ve met them. While agencies will do this based on the brief you’ve given on the phone, at Anderson Hoare we always like to meet you in person before we send across CVs. This is because finding you the perfect candidate is about so much more than ticking off a checklist of what’s on their CV against the brief you’ve given us. We meet all our candidates so we can really get to know them and understand their personalities, once we’ve been to your office and got to know you we’ll be able to make a far better considered decision about who we think would work well and matches your brief the best.

Question our opinion Ask us why we’ve chosen certain candidates and what we think their most positive attributes are. A good recruitment agency will want to work closely with you and be willing to discuss every candidate in detail as doing so means we can refine and adapt our suggestions as we move through the process. The more you talk to us and get us to justify what we’re doing the more we learn about the kind of person you are looking for.

Give good and quick feedback A good agency will adapt their candidate shortlists to reflect your feedback, therefore the quicker you provide this and the more details you give the better as it means we can refine our search, amend our shortlist if necessary and get others over to you quickly.

Get everything prepped up front Here we mean contracts, salaries and how far you’re willing to negotiate. When you find someone you like the chances are things will move very quickly, if you have everything ready in advance we can assist with any referencing and paper work quickly and with far less hassle for yourselves. Good candidates are likely to be going to multiple interviews and will potentially have more than one offer on the table, being able to move quickly can be the difference between the perfect hire and losing out on a great candidate to another offer.