Corporate Affairs Agencies: Bringing Your Recruitment In-House

by Warren Madlin, Director MadlinHanna Consulting

For the past few years, we have helped a number of start-up corporate affairs consultancies across London and Brussels secure top talent and achieve their early-years growth goals, but our relationship with them has been changing.

The Challenge

Within the last six months, as these agencies have started to mature, they face exponential growth and as a consequence, exponential recruitment costs. In quick succession, they have started to ask us how we can redefine our relationship with them; how can they continue to use our expertise, network and knowledge to give them the edge over their competitors, without mounting recruitment fees? This prompted many hours of internal thought and discussion. We spent time thinking about how our offering can mature alongside the clients who have relied on us from the start. The result is a rapid expansion of the services we offer to the industry.

The Solution

We felt that taking a bespoke approach to each requirement was the best way forward, rather than coming up with a set framework that clients had to fit into. Some examples of what we have implemented so far are detailed below:

• For one client, there was simply a need for us to help them raise their profile as an employer in the market and change the direction of travel of talent to increase direct applications and filter out the very best

• For another, we are helping to build an internal recruitment team from scratch - from finding their in-house head-hunters to comprehensive training and development. This may seem like an odd task, to help build a successful team that makes our external service redundant, but it is one we are fully behind, to help our clients solve their long-term talent issues

• And finally, a fully outsourced recruitment function. A desk within our agency with certain days dedicated wholly to managing that client’s end-to-end talent process. From JD writing, advert response and applicant tracking to proactive head-hunting, first-stage interviews and offer management

The whole spectrum of these new solutions are offered on a retained monthly basis, drastically cutting ad-hoc recruitment fees and saving the whole team time that can be re-directed towards clients. These unusual times have been an opportunity to think outside of the box - for our candidates, our clients and us.

MadlinHanna Consulting is a recruitment consultancy specialising in corporate affairs, covering public affairs, corporate communications and financial PR. Contact us on 020 8088 4102 for more information or a confidential conversation about these services and more.