Dear agency / vetting service / outsourcing partner (with a “carefully curated bench of senior talent”)
I’m hiring and I’d like to ask you some questions before you send me a single CV.
Three questions, to be specific.
Each one corresponds to a thing that’s gone wrong for me in the past with someone in your line of work. If you can answer all three honestly, we can work together. If you can’t, please save us both the time.
Question one: do you actually know the candidate?
I’m not asking whether you’ve read their CV. I’m asking whether you have met them in person. Whether you’ve worked with them on something real. Whether you can tell me how they approach a problem they haven’t solved before. Whether you know what motivates them outside of money. Whether you’ve had a conversation with them that lasted longer than the call where you sold them on the role you’re now selling to me.
A recruiter promised me a pay rise if I stayed in a position for more than 3 months, then changed her mind. When I pushed back, she told me I shouldn’t want to leave and that I should be motivated by more than money. I asked what motivated her. Silence. I asked her to tell me one thing about myself that wasn’t on my CV. Silence.
She had been “managing my career” for three months. She knew nothing about me. She was the agency equivalent of a CV without a face — and she had sold me to someone else with the same skin-deep familiarity.
So: do you actually know the person you’re sending? Or are you forwarding a document with someone’s name on it and hoping I won’t ask?
Question two: where are they sitting?
When you tell me about your candidate, are they sitting across from you in your office? Are they a contractor on your bench, available next month? Are they a full-time employee of yours who you’ll be loaning out to me at a markup?
I don’t actually mind which one. I’m fine with all of them. What I mind is when the answer changes after I’ve hired them.
I’ve been on the receiving end of the desk-swap. The top-class engineer I hired turns out to be unavailable three months in, but you have “a suitable replacement,” and the suitable replacement’s English is improving all the time, and somehow they have a different accent on the calls, and I’m now paying senior rates for someone the previous senior was mentoring.
I’ve also been the engineer who got called over to help on three other projects in the same office while the client thought they had my full attention. I know how this works. I know what your sales team writes on the contract and what your delivery team does with it.
My team is fully remote. I will absolutely notice when your “available immediately” candidate is somehow always on calls from a busy office in another time zone and when their productivity takes a dive. So tell me up front. Are they yours? For how long? Will I have them, or will I have whoever happens to be sitting at that desk in six months?
Question three: what’s the headcount you’ve already decided I need?
When you walk through my requirements with me, are you genuinely listening to what I need? Or are you calculating how many of your people you can place on this engagement before I notice? And, please, don’t tell me that you can replace my team (who you know nothing about) with a team of your own — it’s the oldest cliché and, frankly, tiring.
I once worked under a London agency rep who pulled his whole team into a room and announced that his target was to triple the headcount on the client’s project over the next twelve months. The client had a six-month delivery deadline. I left that company. The project was still grinding eighteen months later.
I also once landed at the tail end of a project for another prestigious agency to help finish it and discovered that the customer had been paying for two teams. Why? Because the iPad came in two screen sizes, and the agency had sold the client two teams of mobile developers — one for each iPad size — plus a full web team, for what was, in reality, a single web-framed mobile project. Three teams, mixed codebases, teams building duplicate screens, spiralling invoices. The client never knew. The agency knew exactly what it was doing (some of them were embarrassed about it but no one wanted to confront it).
These aren’t extreme examples. They’re the model. Agencies are paid by headcount; clients are charged by headcount; nobody’s compensation depends on doing the job efficiently. The pressure runs entirely the other way.
So: when you’re scoping my requirements, are you trying to solve my problem, or grow your billable hours? I’d like the first one, please.
I want to be clear about something. I am not saying agencies are bad. I have hired through agencies many times. I have worked through agencies. Some of them have been genuinely useful and some of the candidates they sent have stayed with my teams for years.
What I’m saying is that the defaults of the industry — the model, the incentives, the sales process, the bench-management system — work against me. If you want my business, you need to work against those defaults too. Tell me when the candidate isn’t quite who they appear. Tell me when the scope is smaller than I think. Tell me when I should hire one of your people instead of three. Tell me when you don’t have the right person and I should look elsewhere.
The agents I like working with are the ones who tell me no sometimes. Who say “this isn’t a fit, try this other firm.” Who match candidates carefully because they’re playing a long game with my business rather than a short one with this month’s placement target.
If that’s you, please get in touch. I have three engineering seats and they all need filling.
If that’s not you — if you recognise yourself in any of the three patterns above — please don’t waste either of our time. I will see it coming.