Recruiting is a tough business. Sometimes you’re given a seemingly impossible req to fill from a client, or sometimes you have a great candidate that you just can’t seem to place. What do you do when you hit that brick wall? What if you had a whole network of like-minded recruiters who could bring you a wealth of talent, determination and diligence? This is what split recruiting is all about. Split placements involve two recruiters who work together to help a client find the best candidate, and help a candidate find the best role for them.

In the NPAworldwide recruiting network, we often see stories of two hard-working recruiters working together to make a placement. Here’s a story of a recent one:

A new firm based in Florida recently made a split with an Ohio-based firm. The Ohio recruiter placed the Florida recruiter’s candidate, an Applications Engineer, in the Machinery/Heavy Equipment industry.

The Ohio recruiter needed help on the role, so she posted it on NPA’s job board, MatchMaker, where the Florida recruiter searched daily: “Checking Matchmaker for candidates and or jobs is something I do daily. That window is always open.”

He began working on the role, and the Ohio-based recruiter was able to reap the benefits of her trading partner’s diligence:

“I treat every position I work on from scratch, as if it was my position,” the Florida recruiter said. “I actually break the job order down by numbers -- most run 1-20. These responses, are what goes into my Scorecard and I send it to the candidate, usually, and ask him/her to respond specifically to each qualification and elaborate if they do or do not have the skills called for. You can usually tell if we are in the right Church right away. Next is, are we in the same Pew? Finally, are we in the right Seat?”

He has his own tried-and-true method of screening candidates, but how does that recruiter use that to match a candidate up with a client he knows nothing about?

“One of the hardest items is to find a candidate from a competitor, without knowing the company your searching on behalf of. [The Ohio-based recruiter] is pretty open, so finding the candidate wasn’t that difficult -- but I believe she placed him with a client unrelated to the actual company I had recruited him for. Sometimes the placing agency has more than one client in the general geographical area the recruiting agency is searching in and, voilà!”

This is a perfect example of a great trading partnership – while the candidate wasn’t placed in the original role the two recruiters worked on, by working together and getting on the same page about the candidate’s qualifications and aspirations, they were still able to place him, and add to their bottom lines!

“NPA works, if you work NPA,” he said.