Beyond Hiring: How to Simplify Vendor Management for Recruitment Agencies

Talent acquisition and recruitment managers continually tell us that their most pressing challenges in working with recruitment agencies seem to always revolve around two things:

• It takes 3 to 6 months for the procurement and legal departments to make an agreement with a new vendor (i.e. a new recruitment agency).
• The talent acquisition and recruitment teams spend a tremendous amount of time and effort maintaining decentralized and offline collaboration with each agency separately, at the high expense of their core recruitment activities.

Gone are the days of manual emails and Excel sheets, so given these issues cause an enormous waste of time, what can be done with modern, digital tools?

Manage hundreds agencies through a single vendor and on one platform

For an enterprise employer, a recruitment agency is another supplier (or vendor). It might be obvious for some; however many executives still assume that a ‘supplier or vendor’ only refers to a company that provides goods or services excluding recruitment. So they don’t expect that ‘Vendor Management’ applies to recruitment agencies as well, and that they can use specialized software applications to manage their headhunting agency suppliers. 

Throughout our experience working with enterprise employers, we have learned that the procurement process for a new recruitment agency (new supplier) takes between 3 and 6 months (for some employers this can be up to 12 months). So, imagine the time it takes an employer to trial, for example, 10 new agencies per year. 

This delay in the procurement of new agencies creates a major challenge for recruitment teams, who are under increasing pressure to meet aggressive hiring KPIs every quarter. Meanwhile, the competition among employers for sourcing qualified talent is getting tougher by the month in today’s tight labour markets. Therefore, reducing the procurement time for new agencies has become one of the top strategic objectives for HR executives, in collaboration with their procurement counterparts.

As an aggregator of vetted and specialized recruitment agencies, Ubidy drastically cuts the procurement time for new agencies from months to less than a week. Via a single agreement with Ubidy, employers can efficiently work with and manage hundreds of suppliers on the Ubidy platform, making it not just an excellent talent sourcing tool, but also a complete and powerful Vendor Management System, helping employers manage their agencies effectively, and making it much easier for their recruitment team to trial a new agency without the risk of losing time and money.

Ubidy simplifies a procurement team’s work by applying global standards gathered from the strictest criteria across seven categories:

1. Compliance with local laws and regulations
2. Ethical conduct
3. Quality of candidates
4. Candidate treatment
5. Commercial viability
6. Communication and transparency
7. Feedback and improvement

By leaving the agency vetting process to Ubidy, procurement teams save themselves work and mitigate risks.

Simplify agency management for recruitment teams

Currently, most employers face burdensome challenges when working with recruitment agencies due to decentralized communication and management processes. Recruiters often interact separately with each agency, resulting in fragmented communication and coordination. This decentralized approach extends to the management of recruitment activities, which is typically handled offline using emails and Excel sheets. Consequently, the recruiters spend around 2-3 weeks per year managing agencies. 

Using the Ubidy platform, employers and their recruitment teams can significantly streamline their processes and enjoy a range of benefits. The platform reduces the effort required to manage agencies from 2-3 weeks to just 4-6 days, thanks to Ubidy’s smart and seamless capabilities. It provides visibility of all recruitment activities in one place, enabling better cost control and governance across multiple recruitment channels. Additionally, Ubidy allows employers to expand and scale up their agency access to hundreds of agencies worldwide in one place. New agencies can be trialled in a matter of days, rather than months, further enhancing efficiency and flexibility in talent acquisition.

Ubidy: the vendor management systems with hundreds agencies out of the box

Ubidy solves the problems of vendor management by saving both procurement and recruitment teams enormous amounts of time that they can devote to higher value adding activities. In addition, Ubidy comes with hundreds of pre-vetted agencies when you sign up, accelerating your hiring activities and helping both recruitment and procurement teams achieve more. Inquire today to understand what this innovative platform can do for you.