Choosing the Top Recruitment Agency in the Philippines
Attracting talents and skills to join your team has never been easy nowadays due to the intense battle between key sectors in the Philippines. The continuous growth in the outsourcing industry, booming economy, and technological trends are the major factors that disrupted the recruitment landscape in the country.
How do you find the right partner with the best recruitment services? You may never have engaged with a recruitment agency before or you are from an overseas location, it’s always a good idea to work with a recruitment firm in the Philippines to help you search for the top Filipino talents that match your requirements.
You can always approach the leading recruiters or headhunters starting in Manila but they vary in a lot of ways and they are not always suitable for what you need. Here are the 10 questions to serve as your guide to finding the right service provider.
1. Do you have access to talents?
This question is pretty straightforward to the vendor when you throw it as soon as you sit down for a meeting. But time is money and you do not want to only hear a simple yes or no answer. That’s why attending to the fine detail will give you a hint of their capability as a recruitment service provider.
How big is their database of candidate profiles? Have they recruited for a similar role in the past? Are you able to share enough insights about a specific talent skill you are looking for?
2. Which are do you specialize in?
There are different types of recruitment or headhunting agencies that are classified as large companies, executive recruiters, specialist firms, and those with service offerings that go beyond recruitment.
Find out which area do they specialize in because you will hear more than just checkmark industries or niches on the list. If they have come across your turf, they should be able to speak the language close to what you practice in the industry. This is where the connection happens.
3. What are your methodologies in finding talent?
If you have done in-house recruitment in the past, this will give you a better idea of why your past strategies and methods didn’t work and the platforms you used were not cost-effective. Learn what new technologies and recruitment trends they follow. Do they still use traditional ways?
4. Who will conduct the search?
You will meet with the owner or director, the marketer, and the account manager but not one of them may be the one who will do the legwork. But what is important is that they are able to convey your message so that the recruitment specialist understands your organization and your approach with depth to get the results you want.
5. What is your selection process?
There are recruiters that just source and screen profiles and just send you plain resumes and that may not help you especially when the role is too complex. You hire an agency to help off-load tasks but instead, they will give you a hard time sifting resumes.
Ask how the selection process goes from their sourcing activities to endorsement so you can also request what you need to move things efficiently.
6. Do you handle background checks?
When you are able to establish the recruitment process, ask the vendor as up to what extent they conduct a background check? The reason being is that they will be happy to handle basic character reference checking during the screening process. However, when you ask for a thorough authentication of every information of the candidate wrote on his resume and supporting documents attached, they may charge this particular service or they will introduce another group that can handle this complex task.
7. How much is the fee for your recruitment services?
Most service providers in the Philippines charge a flat fee per annum, per candidate placed. This industry rate in the Philippines ranges from 8-30% depending on the position and how complex is the task.
There’s also a retainer fee arrangement but that is mostly agreed when you only outsource one or the entire recruitment process where deliverables are based on the set parameters and key performance indicators.
8. Do you provide value-added services?
There’s only one way to do business and it’s to grow. Value-added services are also important especially if you are able to map out your plan ahead to expanding your business. These services are offered because a good vendor knows what you need in the process.
What you do is open your ideas and plans on the table and see what they can do with their value-added services. In the end, you get to benefit and enjoy cost-savings for getting a much more attractive pricing scheme.
9. What is your service guarantee?
Does the agency provide a replacement to the hired candidate that failed to stay for a longer period? The standard in the recruitment industry is three months guaranteed period but as a client, you should do all the necessary measures to ensure that the candidate is fit enough before you bring him/her on board.
Sometimes replacement can take long especially for leadership and critical roles and you can’t afford if this will affect your operations.
10. Do you process visa applications if ever we decide to bring candidates overseas?
A lot of companies bring in Filipino professionals overseas as the job requires to perform on-site. If you think that you might need the service in the future, it will be helpful to ask this question so you can plan out ahead. There are recruitment agencies in the Philippines, that are licensed to deploy Filipino workers overseas which are regulated by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA).
The bottom line of having the right partner is always to help you save time, resources, and energy to get the value of what you pay for.