Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Staffing Agency

Before signing with a staffing agency, ask how they source and screen candidates, what their fee structure is, what their replacement guarantee covers, who actually works your roles, and what their average time-to-fill is for positions like yours.

Those five answers separate a genuine hiring partner from a resume forwarder. Everything below expands on what a good answer sounds like, and what a bad one is hiding.

Most companies evaluate staffing agencies on price and speed. Those matter, but they are the two easiest things for an agency to say something reassuring about. The questions that actually predict whether the engagement works are less comfortable to ask.

Ask where the candidates actually come from. The honest answers are some mix of an existing network, active sourcing, inbound applications, and job boards. The answer you are listening for is specificity.

An agency that says "we have a large database" is describing a list. An agency that can tell you how they would approach your particular role, which channels they would use for it, and why, is describing a method.

Follow up with: how many of your placements last year came from people who were not actively job hunting? Anyone can forward applicants. Reaching people who were not looking is the harder, more valuable skill, and it is the main thing you are paying a fee for.

This is where most engagements quietly fail. Ask them to walk you through exactly what happens between a candidate expressing interest and that candidate reaching your inbox.

Listen for whether anyone at the agency actually speaks to the candidate, and what that conversation is designed to establish. Some agencies run a genuine competency interview. Others run a fifteen-minute availability-and-salary check and call it screening.

Useful follow-ups:

• What specifically do you assess beyond what is on the resume?
• Do you test or verify skills, and how?
• What percentage of candidates you screen do you actually submit?

That last number is quietly revealing. An agency submitting nearly everyone it screens is not filtering. An agency that submits two or three carefully chosen people is doing the work you hired them for.

Get the fee structure in writing before anything else, because the models are not comparable to one another.

Model	How it is charged	Typical range
Direct hire / permanent placement	One-time fee, percentage of first-year base salary	Commonly 15-30%, higher for executive or specialised roles
Contract / temporary staffing	Ongoing markup on top of the worker's pay rate	Commonly 25-50% for W2 workers, varying widely by role and market
Contract-to-hire conversion	Fee when you convert a contractor to permanent	Commonly 11-21% of projected first-year salary

These ranges are widely reported across the staffing industry and vary meaningfully by role complexity, geography and market conditions. Treat any single number as a starting point for negotiation rather than a fixed rate.

The questions that matter more than the headline percentage:

• Is the fee calculated on base salary or total compensation including bonus?
• When is it invoiced, and on what payment terms?
• Are there fees if we hire someone you submitted but we sourced independently?
• What happens to the fee if the person leaves in month two?

Almost every agency offers one. They differ enormously in what they are worth.

Ask three things. How long is the guarantee period? Thirty days is common and close to meaningless, because most mis-hires are not obvious until month three. Ninety days is a more serious commitment.

Is it a replacement or a refund? A replacement guarantee obliges you to keep working with an agency that already got it wrong once. A refund gives you the choice.

What voids it? Read this carefully. Guarantees frequently exclude redundancy, role changes, restructuring, and any situation the agency can characterise as your fault. A guarantee with enough exclusions is a marketing line, not a protection.

You are often sold by a senior person and serviced by a junior one. That is not automatically a problem, but you should know it going in.

Ask directly: who is the person doing the sourcing and screening day to day, how many other clients are they working simultaneously, and will I have direct contact with them or only with an account manager?

An agency recruiter carrying fifteen active roles across eight clients cannot give yours meaningful attention. That is not a character flaw; it is arithmetic.

Ask for numbers, and notice whether they have them.

• Average time-to-fill for roles comparable to yours
• Submission-to-interview ratio
• Interview-to-offer ratio
• Percentage of placements still in seat at twelve months

The last one is the most important and the least frequently volunteered. An agency that places quickly but whose people leave within a year is exporting a problem to you. If they cannot produce retention data at all, that itself is the answer.

Generic diligence only gets you so far. These surface whether the agency understands what you are actually dealing with.

• Have you filled this exact role before, and can you describe how it went?
• What do you think will be hard about this search?
• What would make you turn down this engagement?
• What do you need from us for this to work?

The third and fourth questions are the most diagnostic. An agency willing to tell you a search is a bad fit, or that your interview process is the bottleneck, is an agency treating you as a partner rather than a transaction. An agency that says yes to everything has told you what it optimises for.

In our experience the failure is rarely that the agency could not find anyone. It is that the company and the agency never agreed on what "good" meant for the role before the search started.

An agency working from a job description alone is guessing at your real criteria. The engagements that work begin with a genuine calibration conversation, and usually a mid-search recalibration once the first few candidates have revealed what the job description got wrong.

If an agency does not ask you hard questions before starting, it will send you plausible people who are wrong in ways nobody defined in advance.

We are a staffing agency, so it is fair to point out that everything above is a list of questions you could put to us.

That is the intention. The Chum Effect places people through contract staffing, contract-to-hire and direct placement, and we would rather be evaluated on the answers than on a pitch.

For the record, the short version of ours: every candidate is interviewed by a human before you see them, those interviews are recorded so you can review the reasoning rather than rely on our summary of it, and we match the hiring approach to your company's stage instead of running the same process for a ten-person business and a thousand-person one.

If you are evaluating agencies right now, tell us what you are hiring for and put the list above to us directly.