Do recruitment agencies have a possibility to refuse to cooperate with clients?

More recently, we at Lucky Hunter have faced the fact that some clients don't fully understand the specifics of our collaboration. Since we provide a service for the selection of IT talents, some clients are convinced that we take on any role that suits our specialization.

In fact, this is not the case. There are some reasons why we can refuse to cooperate because our work is based on the fundamental principle of IT recruiting - the principle of partnership with the client.

What is the principle of partnership?

The principle of partnership includes certain rules for cooperation. This includes joint work on the vacancy filling, mutual motivation of candidates, quick feedback on specialists' CVs.

Some may think that the principle of partnership is a story that occurs after the contract signature. In fact, It is not quite so. The partnership approach starts working from the very first minute of acquaintance, and its central feature is equality.

By equality, we mean mutual respect and mutual agreement to cooperation. You must admit that when you hire a specialist for a company, not only you choose the candidate, but the candidate also chooses the company. This is a two-way process, and it's important that not only an employee is suitable for you, but also that your company meets the specialist's expectations.

Cooperation with Lucky Hunter is based on a similar principle: it's very valuable for us if the company is ready to work with us, but it is also valuable for us to work with like-minded clients.

Therefore, during the first meeting with the client, we not only introduce ourselves to the client but sometimes ask the client to tell us a little bit more about the company, team, processes.

It seems to us that this is quite logical: this is the only way we can determine the "compatibility level" with the client and, having agreed to cooperate, be 100% confident in comfortable, productive collaboration.

Why can we refuse to cooperate?

No match

We at Lucky Hunter work with only like-minded clients. For example, if we see that our views with the client are somewhat different, we will most likely refuse to cooperate, realizing that this cooperation most likely will be ineffective.

And this is quite natural: for the successful position filling, it's important for us to have a long-awaited match with the client.

Case

Once during the first call with a client, we asked him to tell a bit more about the company. Convinced that only the company makes the decision on cooperation, the client was somewhat discouraged by our question, considering it a little inappropriate. Such a way of looking at things immediately showed us that the client and us most likely would not work together, so we had to refuse to cooperate.

IT recrutiment agency Lucky Hunter Class

A few years ago, Lucky Hunter was a small recruitment agency with three Recruiters on staff. Today Lucky Hunter is an international company with several offices, 15 employees, its own service for tech recruiting CVHub and, of course, is one of the best agencies in terms of service quality.

Having reached a new level of quality and having proved the exclusivity of our services, we no longer work with companies that find it financially difficult to cooperate with Lucky Hunter.

Nevertheless, understanding the complexity of launching IT startups, we still provide discounts to young projects and are ready to provide maximum assistance, offering cooperation on preferential terms :)

Overload

The demand for our services has grown by more than 70% over the past year, however, we continue to cope with the workload, constantly expanding the staff of recruiters. Nevertheless, during a period of serious workload, if we understand that we don't have enough resources to effectively fill a new vacancy, we most likely won't able to take on it.

We believe that there are no impossible tasks in recruiting. However, when we realize that we won't be able to create a good flow of candidates for new clients due to the high workload, we will honestly tell the client about it and, therefore, refuse to cooperate.

Start working on filling a position, but not showing enough candidates is not our story.

Non-market working conditions

We don't start working on a role if the vacancy contains non-competitive working conditions or requirements for a specialist. At the same time, we are ready to consider cooperation if the client is ready to pay heed to our recommendations and will try to adjust the vacancy profile in accordance with the realities of the market.

If for some reason the client can't change the conditions of hiring a candidate, we'll have to refuse to work together.

Case

Recently some company was looking for a specialist to work under-the-counter wage and contacted us with the request to find the specialist ready to work under such conditions. The client was also convinced that we, for our part, don't choose whom to cooperate with, so he immediately sent us a contract to sign. Having received a refusal to cooperate, the client was surprised by this turn of events, which inspired us to write this article :)

Lucky Hunter's refusal to cooperate with the client doesn't mean that we dictate terms on the market. We are only trying to show that our work is as challenging and valuable as yours.

We don't take an advance payment for our services, we provide a free replacement for a candidate who hasn't passed the probational period, we bear a large number of risks.

Therefore, we provide service only to those companies, cooperation with which will bring both the client and us effective results, and is able to create strong partnerships for many years to come in the future.

Contact Lucky Hunter! We are confident that we will be able to build strong partnerships with you, and of course, fill even the most challenging IT position.

Polina Barabanova

Content Manager at Lucky Hunter

Specializes in tech staff recruitment, startups, tech research, career, HR, and news topics. With her expertise, she provides valuable insights and practical advice to navigate the ever-evolving tech industry.