Hiring an international staffing agency is a major leap for your businesses and a sensible choice if you need a flow of employees from across Europe. Still, to ensure everything goes right, you need to choose the right agency that prioritises long-term cooperation over short-term gains.
How to select the best staffing partner? Here are 20 essential questions you need to ask yourself before hiring them.
1. How Do You Ensure the Vacancy is Understood and Communicated Correctly to the Job Seeker?
As new vacancies flood in with different conditions and required skills for job seekers. With a constant flow of information, it’s easy for agencies to lose sight of what information belongs to what client or recruitment agency.
In a worst case scenario, a candidate may travel to the job’s country of origin just to find out that they were provided the wrong job information. The arrival is the most critical aspect of the job seeker’s customer journey and when it doesn’t match their expectations, there’s a high risk of them leaving the agency in the following few days.
This is why it’s crucial for recruiters to get every vacancy detail right and properly communicate it to candidates.
How Can Recruiters Do That?
Recruiters can email all the work-related information to the job seeker directly, and ask for confirmation whether that candidate understands and accepts everything. Recruiters may also ask candidates to sign pre-contracts where they state that they accept and understand everything.
In short, the staffing agency must have a recruitment process that ensures efficient communication and initial candidate satisfaction. If job seekers are off to a bad start, your cooperation may hurt your branding in the sourcing country and you know, lousy experiences spread faster than good ones.
2. What is Your Vacancy Fulfilment Time?
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Hiring speed is paramount for every company, especially those who experience higher demands seasonally and need more employees to meet the requirements. The faster the hire can start working, the better the partnership between the client and the agency.
Before opting for a staffing agency as an employer, it’s good to know how much time it takes them to fill vacancies, on average. If you see that the agent knows what they are doing very well and gives detailed answers to your questions, you can ask them how they can assist your business in speeding up the fulfilment time.
If speed is what you want, work with an agent you trust, so you don’t need to worry about your recruitment. If this trust is not there, it’s better to give your recruitment to another agent or do it yourself.
3. What is Your Vacancy Fulfilment Rate?
Apart from speed, fulfillment rate is another key factor in growth. Most recruitment agencies will likely not have a fulfilment rate, but this is essential data for growing your business.
To put this into perspective, it’s better to work with one more prominent staffing agency with a high fulfilment rate (90% or higher, for example) than to gather many little international companies with a 50% rate each.
Also, working with more agencies at the same time is cumbersome, and you are better off focusing on your core business. Why would you add more agencies to your list if they are unable to fulfill the requests in the first place?
This only creates dissatisfaction and frustration for the employer and agencies are better off having few satisfied clients than several unsatisfied partners.
4. How Do Candidates Rate Your Service?
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Another important factor when hiring a new foreign recruitment agency is to look at the reviews from the candidates who worked with them. Usually, every staffing agency has a Facebook page and Google reviews. If they offer excellent service, this is reflected on these platforms.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) would be an even better metric, as it’s used to measure customer satisfaction. Just for reference, job seekers will be able to rate a particular recruiter or staffing agency in the Netherlands, Germany, or Belgium 9 days after their arrival.
As a matter of fact, if you come across an agent that already measures NPS tells a lot about how much they care about their candidates and know that their satisfaction is the key in successful hiring processes.
Do Online Reviews Matter?
When speaking to recruitment agencies in the Netherlands, I’ve heard several times that online reviews don’t say anything: the only experiences shared on the internet are the terrible ones. I don’t agree with this point of view.
People will speak about your business online and offline if you create excellent service.
Word of mouth is arguably the most effective marketing tool there is, especially in international talent acquisition. Approximately 50% of word-of-mouth recommendations happen offline.
Having a bad rep online will also lead to a bad rep offline. Serious staffing agencies must take online comments and reviews into consideration if they want to improve their services and show that they actually care about people.
5. What Criteria Does The Agent Use to Match Candidates?
The criteria used by the recruitment agency to match your positions to their candidate pool is what makes the difference between good and great agents.
Good staffing agencies work with experienced recruiters who are responsible and know what makes a candidate a good fit for a role.
Good recruiters feel responsible for the candidate to ensure their pleasant journey abroad. A responsible recruiter will go the extra mile for the candidate, offering more details to ensure they get the job they are hoping to get.
However, while this approach is excellent, it isn’t scalable. The more international job openings there are, the more people apply and the harder it becomes to remain responsible, avoid bias and to match the candidate to the right role.
That’s why larger staffing agencies are using technology and data to match candidates with vacancies. They match the data collected from people who previously left to work abroad and match it with the profile of the new job seeker. If you combine data matching with having responsible recruiters, you have a golden, scalable matching tool.
The worst agents are the ones that charge money to the job seeker.
Surprisingly enough, some agents still charge money for finding work abroad.
We would advise adding in the cooperation agreement you sign with the new recruiting partner that they guarantee no fee is charged, in any shape (you might be laughing, but sometimes they call it “creating a CV charge” or “travel cost,” for example).
According to Dutch law, you can’t charge people a fee for finding a job. It is the worst matching criterion. People who are willing to pay the price will be the ones getting the job. Does that result in a good match?
6. How Many Confirmed People Do Not Show Up (Without Providing Information Before Arrival)?
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We all know how frustrating it gets when you request a group of people for a new client, the recruiting partner confirms that the people are ready to go but on Monday morning, no one had arrived, especially when these people already live in the country where the job offer opened.
In our experience, when people come from abroad, the chances of them actually showing up at the job is consistently higher. The problem with the people who live in the source country usually boils down to either agency hopping rather than building a career, or working with different agencies and always looking for the better opportunity.
For international recruiters, the commitment to get the candidate to the workplace is also a more intricate commitment, and a low no-show rate shows responsibility. That said, when speaking with international recruiters, knowing their no-show rate is essential
An acceptable no-show rate is one that is lower than 10% over an extended period. A higher no-show rate will drain too many operational resources and energy from your organization and your clients.
7. What Is Your Candidates’ Average Duration of Stay and How You Measure It?
Without doubt, this is the most important key performance metric your international recruiting partner can bring to the table. It summarises EVERYTHING, from how good the recruiter is at informing the applicant to how high the no-show rate is and how satisfied the candidates are with the provided service and the job itself.
This metric is a crucial factor in growing your business and improving turnover rates. The longer people stay, to more satisfied the clients will be and the more likely they will ask for more people in the future.
The Problem: Duration of Stay Can Be Measured in Different Ways
The only main problem with this KPI is that all staffing agencies will have their own way of measuring the data.
For instance, some agencies may measure all the people who started in the last full calendar year. While this is useful, it doesn’t give a correct duration of stay. Many people just started and will likely work for longer than a year. So, when you ask for the average stay duration, it is good to understand how this is measured.
Another data problem in measuring the duration of stay is when the staffing agency is hiring many people for seasonal jobs.
For example, students who want to work only in the summer or people who want to go to the Netherlands, Belgium, or Germany just for the Christmas period. These significantly impact the overall average duration of stay of people recruited by the agency. In this case, the duration of stay is shorter, but that doesn’t mean that the agency isn’t successful.
When you speak to an international recruitment agency, it’s good to go into these details. If they are client-oriented, they should have their story ready regarding their candidates’ duration of stay.
8. How Do You Ensure that Your Recruiters are Up To Date on What’s Happening in the Netherlands, Belgium or Germany?
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You can’t be sure how good an agent’s selection will be. Also, going abroad to work is a huge step for job seekers and recruiters must understand the journey candidates are going to make and the sacrifices they make.
To ensure a smooth transition, recruiters must be empathetic but also understand what’s happening in the countries the candidates will work.Knowing how to help with cultural differences, safety concerns, luggage problems, and housing expectations can go a long way in improving outcomes for everyone involved.
9. What’s Your Earning Model?
The margins at international recruitment agencies are small. The money you pay to an agent significantly affects the staffing agency’s net result. So, you need to know how much you will have to pay the agent.
That fee can be paid in four different ways:
Fee Per Hour
In this model, you share part of the hourly income with the recruiter. The moment the employee stops working for your client, you no longer need to pay a fee to the recruiter. This model is a great way to motivate external recruitment agents to improve their business so that their applicants stay as long as possible.
The better they do their job, the more they are paid, and the better it is for your agency.
Many Eastern European agents are more short-term-driven, so this is an excellent tool to move them to a long-term business thinking model. There is no way to grab money fast in this type of earning model.
A problem with this type of fee is that you, as an agent, are stuck paying the price for a long time, which involves a lot of additional administration inside your company.
I would advise you to use an hourly fee with a potential staffing agency with whom you want to build a long-term relationship: agents that you see as partners in improving your processes and business and who want to be involved in your business model.
One-Time Fee
A one-time fee is paid after successful placement. This successful placement period can be either on the arrival day, after two weeks of employment, or later.
The one-time fee varies from 150 euros per arrangement to 1,500 euros. The cost is based on the kind of people hired and the caliber of the services rendered by the international staffing agency.
For the agent’s business model abroad, this is most likely the most attractive fee. From a business perspective, it is always better to collect money now than later. The money can now be used right away for the company’s development.
But for a Dutch employment agency, this model isn’t ideal, as most staffing agencies abroad have a shorter-term mindset compared to Dutch agencies. The chances are high that the business model of the international agency will be to send as many people as possible without concern for the duration of their stay.
For example, the one-off fee is a great way to scale up very fast in the high season. Use this to your advantage.
Payment Per CV or Proposed Candidate
Another payment model, where the Dutch employment agency pays a one-off fee for each candidate’s CV. There are two main problems in this type of model:
- CV Selection
- Time intensiveness
CV Selection
CV Selection doesn’t work in international blue-collar recruitment.
You might require people to speak basic English to get a job, and this is fine. But how does writing a proper CV in English help the job applicant to be a better order picker, for example?
These things have nothing to do with each other. Besides that, approximately 30% of the CVs are not correct. So, are you going to select a factory worker or an order picker based on a CV written in English?
Can you imagine how much of an additional headache this is, for example, for a Portuguese person who barely knows how to write a CV in their language but, based on their skills and personality, would be a perfect order picker?
Time intensiveness
Instead of taking the workload away from your agency in the Netherlands, you do the actual recruitment yourself based on a CV. You need to have people aboard who speak the same language as the person writing the CV, and you need to create the trust of having a limited brand name in the country the person is applying from.
A Combination of The Above
What may be ideal for employment and international recruitment agencies is an hourly fee and a one-time fee. Such a combination can be attractive to foreign recruitment agents to earn more in the short term and still invest in the duration of stay as part of the income.
In the past, I’ve not been a fan of the one-off fee as it doesn’t inspire me as a Dutch business owner who looks to build up relationships and a business model for the long term. Still, have in mind that most of the international recruitment agents have a different mindset than I do, the combination of the one-off fee and the hourly fee might be an ideal mix.
Along with asking about their earning model, it’s good to go into further detail and ask why they chose this earning model.
10. How Much Do You Charge for Your Services?
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What you pay is what you get. Before you start speaking about pricing, it’s good to summarise your expectations—basically, how vital the points above are for your staffing agency.
In a competitive market, prices range between 35 cents per hour and 50 cents per hour, often with a maximum pay of 1040 or 2080 hours. Why would you pay more if you’re only after people, and the recruitment process and the chances that a person shows up are less critical for you?
It’s also a matter of how expensive it is for your organization to onboard new colleagues. If onboarding goes smoothly and doesn’t require too much of your operational resources, then a “worse” selection doesn’t matter.
Not many staffing agencies know exactly how much it costs to onboard a new foreign worker. One staffing agency stated that it costs 350 euros per new team member, which is higher than expected. But if you add up all the expenses of onboarding a new colleague, for example:
- First night in the accommodation
- Transportation from the accommodation
- Introduction day
- Costs going to the municipality
- Introduction to the client
- Introduction to the new housing
- Empty beds between the new arrival and departure of an old colleague
- Training the new colleague at work
- Organizing contracts
- Organizing work clothes and transport
- Other expenses
- 350 euros to onboard a new member sounds OK.
Interestingly, most staffing agencies don’t know how much their recruitment costs per working hour, which is baffling. Although staffing agencies understand that recruitment is an integral part of their business model, their recruitment is often less cost- and efficiency-driven.
It’s part of the whole earning model, which should be profitable. If the business model’s hiring is not useful, it doesn’t significantly impact the entire business. As long as the quality of the selection is good, it’s OK.
When staffing agencies outsource their recruitment, this becomes a different story. Without a proper selection and an acceptable price, an external staffing agency will soon run out of business.
Many agents are starting and stopping in the same year as an international staffing agency (aside from the fact that, unfortunately, many agents care less about the people who are recruited and are more interested in short-term gain). So, a fee per hour paid to an external staffing agency forces them to become more efficient and better.
Setting the right price for each client is quite hard. You can calculate this according to our total cost, but a better model is to pay for the added value you bring to a staffing agency.
If the staffing agency requires less value and agrees to accept people that don’t speak English, for example, it’s OK to work even under the total cost per hour because each jobseeker will not make it to hire, which costs the international agency money.
The more people and the more efficiently you hire them, the bigger the choice for both staffing agencies and candidates, and the better the selection will be.
So, before talking about the fee with the international staffing agency, it’s good to know at least the following:
- How much does onboarding cost?
- How much do you spend now on recruitment per worked hour?
- How long is your average duration of stay with these costs?
After answering these three questions, you will know a reasonable price for international recruitment agency services.
11. How Do You Ensure the Quality of The Selection?
How does the international recruiter ensure that the people going abroad meet the quality you expect as an employment agency? How are the candidates’ English-language competencies checked, and what standard is used for measuring the level of a certain language?
We all understand that answering “what is your name?” doesn’t mean someone speaks English. You can also do background checks of the quality in other ways, such as by checking references.
This slows down the recruitment process dramatically, and it’s always questionable how reliable these references are. Also, who creates CVs these days with references? Most people use their mobile phones when they apply for work. Have you ever tried to write a CV on a mobile phone?
From your side, what language skills you expect in selecting staff members should be evident. It’s excellent if employees can speak English, but a brilliant youngster who finished his master’s degree will likely not be motivated to work for a long time as an order picker.
Setting the right requirements is essential here. If only the basics of English are needed to perform the job, why ask for excellent English-language speakers? If conditions are set correctly, the chances for long-term, satisfying employment for both the candidates and the employer will increase drastically.
12. What Actions Do You Have in Place to Reduce No-Show Rates?
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How can staffing agencies ensure that the confirmed number of people actually arrive and start working?
They can use, for example:
- Service agreements, wherein the jobseeker agrees that he informs the recruiter on time in case something changes in his plans
- A copy of the transport tickets, whether by plane, train, or bus, for example
- A call from the recruiter a day before the departure day
- A reminder by SMS or email about the departure and arrival information
In the end, it’s all about having trust in the candidate. If the recruiters did a good job communicating the details of the job, it’s very likely that the candidates will show up.
13. Do You Have Licenses in Your Country to Perform Recruitment Activities?
Especially in Eastern European countries, international recruitment agencies have a bad reputation in general; for example, in Lithuania, many stories go around of people treated inappropriately by recruiters when they were interested in working abroad.
They often pay the recruiter, leave for abroad just to find out nothing has been arranged. When they come back home, the recruiter is long gone. What is taken for granted in the Netherlands is not that standard in many Eastern European countries.
Another problem is that many Eastern European countries suffer from talent loss. The number of people migrating from their nation to the West is much higher than the birthrate. The population is shrinking.
Because of the two reasons mentioned above, the Ministry of Labor introduced licensing for active staffing companies. Some countries, such as Latvia and Romania, are very strict in setting rules and regulating staffing companies that work in international recruitment.
It can be quite a struggle to explain to these authorities how we offer our services remotely instead of having a traditional office. But we can’t expect these institutions to move at the same speed as their business colleagues. Other countries within Europe that require a license to recruit people are, for example, Slovakia and Hungary.
So, if you are speaking to agents from one of these countries, do the necessary background checks to ensure they have their licenses in order.
14. How Big is Your Recruitment Team?
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While this isn’t a key concern, it’s still good to know the size of the recruiter team. If you rely on recruitment from external parties and suddenly lose a recruitment channel because of the business owner’s reasons, it creates additional stress in the organisation. Also, knowing someone will pick up tasks while other recruiters are on breaks, holidays, or sick leave is a good thing.
15. What Tasks can You Perform for Us Aside From Candidate Selection?
Working together with an external staffing partner can help you smooth your hiring process. For example, if the recruiting agent is collecting data from the job applicants, this can be easily transferred to your internal system.
With this, you gain speed in the recruitment process, and your operation can spend time more with new candidates instead of dealing with paperwork..
Another way to save time is to let the external recruiter ask the applicant to fill in all the requested data and collect all the materials (such as a scanned ID) to create a working contract in the Netherlands, Belgium, or Germany.
Let automation work to your advantage and spend your energy in places where it is needed most. People!
16. What Are Your Company’s Values?
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If you plan on being in for the long-term with your recruitment agency, knowing each other’ s values is essential. Aligning them makes communication smoother, especially among different countries and cultures that are often remote.
Without clear values, there will be nothing satisfactory to take the cooperation to the next level and give that extra push to the partnership when it is needed most: during a crisis but also when business is booming.
A similar view of running a business is that it creates connections that go beyond a money-based market. It sounds very cliché, but it’s creating a better world.
17. What Type of People Do You Recruit on Average?
Do your recruiters have any specialties? Different recruiting skills are needed for logistics workers and craftspeople. Usually, each company will have its own expertise and you should look for one that’s specialised in your sector/industry.
This also means that you will have to know who the average worker is in your organization. In cases where the foreign staffing agency works with a similar persona, it’s a great advantage. They will likely know how to find these types of people and what companies they will be the best fit for.
18. With Whom Do You Do Business, and Could You Share References?
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Most of the staffing agencies you work with should come through referrals. It’s rather logical that if companies enjoy working with them and have good experiences, you will cooperate well with them too.
Why not ask your potential staffing agency about the clients they are already working with and ask them for a reference? Some staffing agencies are afraid that the reference will send people to their competitor instead of their agency.
19. What Extra Do You Do To Make Job Seekers Happy?
The average duration of stay of your candidates is the best KPI for measuring the quality of the selection of a staffing agency and it depends on the jobseeker’s satisfaction. You can ask the following essential questions:
- What do you do, as a recruitment agency, to make jobseekers happy?
- How do you make sure that they will be satisfied when they arrive?
- Do you stay in touch with them after their arrival?
- Do you connect them to other people?
There are many ways to satisfy potential candidates. The satisfaction of people is not in the hands of the employment agency but of the recruitment agency.
The question “What do you do extra to make jobseekers happy?” will answer how well the staffing agency understands the customer journey of jobseekers.
20. What Can You Do to Grow Our Sales or Save Costs?
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The essential question you must ask an international recruitment agency when you plan a new partnership is how they can help you grow your sales and/or save costs. Honestly, you’re looking for a potential staffing partner to increase sales or save costs.
There are more ways an agency can achieve this apart from hiring talent. Think about introduction videos that the agent can shoot with potential candidates and that you and your sales squad can take to prospective clients.
Or let the agent organize a relationship trip where you and your clients can see where people are coming from, try to understand the culture, and then make an informed decision. It’s a win-win situation for the staffing agency and the client, where applicants will eventually go to work.
In a partnership with the right staffing agency, you’ll help each other save on costs. When working together, many tasks overlap. Try to eliminate these duplicated tasks by importing data or documents.
Another way to save on costs is to optimize the entire hiring process and see it as a whole picture where both the international recruitment agency and the Dutch employment agency are involved. That way, you can streamline the entire hiring process and come together as a clean and lean organization that is scalable and ready for growth.
Another excellent example of cost-saving is outsourcing tasks to lower-cost labor countries. For example, if you create a network with a staffing agency in Eastern Europe, why not use their contacts to connect to translators and website builders?
Eastern European IT specialists are among the best in the world. You manage to work with recruitment agents from these countries; working with IT specialists should work as well, right?
Final Words
Hiring a recruitment agency should be easy if you go through the list of these 20 essential questions and pay attention to all the things we have pointed out.
But you no longer have to search for recruiters.
All you will have to do is send us a vacancy and Hire Abroad will distribute it to recruiters with a proven track record and match perfect job applicants they will later contact and propose.
We provide a 100% guarantee that all data is collected before the candidate departs, which reduces the no-show rate to just 5%
This is just one of many benefits we offer, but you can always get more information on what Hire Abroad can do for you.
