By Federico Alonso. I founded HR Oasis over a decade ago after spending years in HR roles at some of the region’s largest tech companies. I’ve been on both sides of this relationship more times than I can count. What follows is what I actually think, not what agencies typically say publicly.
I’m going to say something that sounds strange coming from someone who runs a recruiting agency: most companies that come to us don’t know how to work with a recruiting agency.
That’s not an insult. It’s just true. And it’s something I’ve spent fifteen years watching play out, sometimes in ways that work out fine, often in ways that cost everyone time and money and end with the client deciding that “agencies don’t work,” when the real issue was how the relationship was set up from the beginning.
So here’s what I actually think goes wrong. And what the companies that get the most out of working with us tend to do differently.
They treat the agency like a vending machine
The most common dynamic I see: a company has an open role. They’ve been trying to fill it internally for two months. Nothing. So they call three agencies, give each of them the same job description, and wait to see who sends CVs first.
That’s not a recruiting partnership. That’s a race to the bottom.
What ends up happening is that each agency sends whoever they have available that loosely fits the keywords in the JD, because they know they’re competing with two other agencies and speed matters more than quality. The client gets flooded with profiles that are sort of right but not quite. Nobody finds what they’re actually looking for. The process drags on. Eventually someone gets hired who’s fine but not great, or the client gives up and does it internally.
The companies that actually hire well with agency support work differently. They choose one agency (or at most two with very clear division of scope) and invest time upfront explaining what they actually need. Not just the job description. What the team is like. What’s worked in this role before. What hasn’t. What the onboarding looks like. What the first three months should look like for the right person.
That conversation changes everything. It means the agency isn’t pattern-matching keywords against a database. They’re thinking about a real problem.
They don’t tell you what’s actually going on
Here’s something that happens constantly. A client sends us a brief. We run the search. We find strong candidates. They go through the process and then one of two things happens: either the client doesn’t move forward with any of them without much explanation, or the candidates start dropping out and the client seems surprised.
When we dig into it, the real story usually comes out. The role has internal politics that weren’t mentioned. The salary range in the brief isn’t actually what’s been approved. There’s a hiring freeze that might or might not apply to this position. The hiring manager and the person who engaged us have different ideas about what they’re looking for.
None of that is unusual. Companies are complicated. But when you don’t share it with your recruiting partner, you waste months and lose candidates who were genuinely good fits for reasons that had nothing to do with them.
The best relationships I’ve had with clients are the ones where they tell me the messy stuff. “The last person in this role lasted six months and here’s why.” “The CTO and the product lead don’t agree on this hire.” “We need someone senior but our budget is mid-level, can we talk about what’s realistic?” Those conversations are uncomfortable to start, but they’re what allows us to actually help.
They think the fee is the main variable
I understand why companies compare agency fees. It’s one of the few things in a recruiting process that’s easy to quantify up front. But optimizing for the lowest fee is usually the wrong move, and here’s why.
The cost of a bad hire or a role that stays open for four months while the team covers the gap is almost always larger than the difference between a 15% placement fee and a 20% placement fee. SHRM’s 2026 benchmarks put the average cost of an unfilled technical role at around $500 per day in lost productivity. At a median fill time of 44 days, that’s $22,000 in vacancy cost before a recruiter ever sends a single CV. The difference between a 15% and a 20% agency fee on a $120,000 role is $6,000. Do the math.
What’s worth paying for is a process where you only see candidates worth your time, where someone who knows the market tells you if your expectations are calibrated correctly, and where the search actually closes. That’s what we try to deliver. And it’s something that’s genuinely hard to evaluate from a fee alone.
I’m not saying fee doesn’t matter. It does. But it shouldn’t be the first or only thing you optimize for when choosing who to work with.
They don’t give feedback and wonder why the process stalls
This one is simple and fixable but I see it constantly.
A candidate interviews. The client says they’ll get back to us. A week passes. We follow up. “Still deciding.” Another week. “We’re aligned, just waiting on one person.” A third week. The candidate, who has been interviewing elsewhere the whole time, accepts another offer. The client is surprised.
The speed at which you give feedback on candidates directly determines the quality of people you end up hiring. Not because better feedback magically produces better candidates, but because the candidates who have real options, the ones you actually want, are not going to hold their job search on pause for three weeks waiting for a company that can’t decide.
When a client tells us within 48 hours what worked and what didn’t about a candidate, we can adjust. We find someone more aligned faster. The process moves. When feedback comes ten days later and amounts to “not the right fit,” we’ve lost time we can’t recover and often lost the candidate in the shortlist to another process.
The fastest hires I’ve been part of had clients who treated feedback like it was part of their job, because it is.
What actually works
I’ve been doing this long enough to see patterns. The engagements that end with a client saying “this is the best hire we’ve made in years” almost always have a few things in common.
The client was honest with us from day one. About the budget, about the team dynamics, about what went wrong with previous hires. We weren’t the fourth agency they called after the other three didn’t deliver.
They gave us a real brief. Not just a job description, but a real conversation about what success looks like in the role twelve months from now. That’s the information that actually helps us find the right person.
They moved quickly when we found someone good. Not recklessly, proper evaluation still happened, but they understood that good candidates don’t wait and they built their internal process around that reality.
And they treated the relationship like a partnership. They asked us what we were seeing in the market. They told us when something wasn’t working so we could adjust. They understood that a recruiter who knows your company well is more valuable than one you start from scratch with every time you have an opening.
There’s also something that happens over time in the best client relationships that’s hard to put a number on. The more we work with a company, the better we get at finding people who fit. Not just technically, but in terms of how they work, what they need to stay, what would make them leave in six months. That institutional knowledge doesn’t transfer when you rotate through agencies. It compounds when you stick with one. The clients who treat every search as a one-off transaction never build that advantage. The ones who think of their recruiting partner as part of the team do.
None of this is complicated. But the companies that do all of these things consistently are a minority, which is why when they show up, the hiring process feels remarkably different from both sides.
If you’ve worked with agencies before and it didn’t go well, I’d genuinely like to know what happened. Not to defend the model, but because there’s usually something specific that broke down and it’s almost always fixable.
📩 fede@hroasis.com 🔗 Connect with Federico on LinkedIn
