What actually happens when you engage multiple recruiters?

Imagine you ask three people to get you a bottle of wine. The one who gets the best bottle wins £5,000. The other two get... nothing.

Wine buyer one thinks to himself - let's go quick and dirty. He rushes off to his local corner shop, buys ten bottles and plonks them on the table in front of you.

Wine buyer two thinks to himself - let's play the odds. He goes to Waitrose, selects three bottles of Bordeaux, because that's usually good, and delivers them with a nice note.

Wine buyer three has a different method. He books an appointment at an exclusive wine seller in London, and goes over there to taste a variety of wines from regions that he knows well. He calls and shares some tasting notes with you before returning with a single bottle that he's sure you'll like.

If only life were this simple, but you can see here how each wine buyer handles the balance of risk and reward... and this is exactly what recruiters do.

The problem here is that you've asked three people to do some work, and they only have a one in three chance of getting paid for that work. And that results in potentially different approaches from the wine buyers. Or recruiters.

Take the first wine buyer, for instance. In recruitment terms, this is your classic job ad and database search. If it works, it works. If it doesn't work, they might say to themselves: well we only had a 33% chance of winning and we can focus on opportunities with a 50% chance or higher.

Play the odds.

The second wine buyer - or recruiter - would be the type of recruiter who would seek to understand the role, be a little more targeted, but not put in a huge amount of effort. Again, with a one in three chance of winning a fee, the recruiter isn't as motivated, but is using some market knowledge to gain an advantage.

The third scenario is probably not going to happen if you hire multiple recruiters. After all, with a one in three chance of winning the fee, would they really go to all the effort of headhunting, screening candidates (or tasting wine, same thing), sharing some tasting notes and making an educated selection of one?

It's quite possible that you actually want a bottle of Jacob's Creek. You might like that. Maybe that's all you need.

So in that case, why would you engage recruiter number three to go out and find you a 1975 bottle of Chateau Margaux?

And inversely, if you wanted a 1975 Chateau Margaux, you're not going to find that with the first option, and if you do, I want to know the address of that particular corner shop.

You get what you pay for, and you get how you pay for it

Ultimately, recruitment - however you do it - results in the same end product. A successful candidate.

So does methodology matter? The scenario above shows that it does matter, depending on what kind of candidate you want.

If there are many candidates who meet the requirements, then you probably don't need a recruiter at all - and if you do, you just need a recruiter to sift through the many applications and make a shortlist for you. You're looking for time savings as much as anything.

If there are few candidates who meet the requirements, then your methodology does matter. And you do need a recruiter who takes the third methodology seriously.

Which means you can only engage one recruiter, for two reasons.

Reason one, as we've discussed, is that they need to be motivated to do the work. Even a 50/50 chance of earning a fee isn't good business sense, unless you have lots of similar opportunities on the boil, and that means your candidates are going to be put forward to multiple roles.

Reason two is that with a small market, it's dreadful employer branding to have two different recruiters approaching the same people on your behalf. Because that is what will happen.

Everyone has the same technology and the same databases, so everyone can find the candidates if they're any good. So the art is in the approach, and the relationships they own. You simply don't want the candidate market to think that you're unprofessional.

There is also the risk that you might pull the role - so if you're paying on a contingent basis, even if it's exclusive, you're still not top of the list in terms of priority. Those who pay on a retained basis will always get preference, even for lower fees. So how you pay is often more important than how much you pay.

If you're going exclusive...

... the last thing you want is a wine buyer who spends two weeks propped up at the bar drinking every wine under the sun. They may be having a lovely time, but they're not delivering.

Agree on some mutually beneficial - and realistic - timelines. A good recruiter will always know how long it takes to find a particular profile within a particular industry, and the higher up the business you go, the longer that will be.

But exclusivity cannot last forever. So lock in catch-ups, progress reports and candidate presentation deadlines.

Should you ever go multi-recruiter?

Usually, no. You may think that you're getting wider access to the market, but you're not. You're simply going from the top of a recruiter's list of priorities down to the bottom. Remember, recruitment agencies are businesses and they have to make money.

If there's a risk that they'll end up working for free - well, they're right to de-prioritise.

However, it could be worthwhile in the following cases:

• You're trialling new recruitment agencies and you'd like to see who you enjoy working with, regardless of delivery
• You have a huge market of candidates and one recruiter may not be enough to cope with the demand
• You wish to trial different methodologies - maybe a headhunter with a job ad & database type scenario, although again beware slipping down the priority list

The risk, of course, is that the multiple recruiters burn your candidate market, put them forward to multiple roles to increase their chances of winning a fee from a candidate and therefore you see your competitors taking talent you should have had. And it still costs the same.