Lever's agencies functionality allows you to share postings your organization's external recruiting partners via a custom job page that they can use to submit candidates directly to your Lever pipeline. Agencies can then be kept up to speed on candidates that they have submitted via daily status emails automatically sent from Lever. This article outlines a few best practices to follow when managing agencies in Lever, to help you maintain the most efficient workflow with your external recruiting partners. For full details, on how the agencies functionality works, refer to our help article on connecting and working with agencies.
Assigning confidential postings to agencies
If you assign a confidential posting to an agency, you will not be able to assign any other postings to that agency. When an agency is configured, Lever creates a custom job page for that agency. That page will list all postings that have been assigned to that agency. Agencies can then share their custom postings page with candidates. If you are outsourcing a sensitive hire (such as an executive backfill) to an agency, it is imperative that the posting can only be seen by candidates in contention for that job and no others. For this reason, Lever will prevent you from assigning a confidential posting to an agency that has other (non-confidential) postings already assigned to it.
If you wish for the same agency to manage both confidential and non-confidential postings, you will need to configure it as two separate agencies in Lever (via Settings > Agencies). Note that while the primary contact can be the same for both agencies, the agencies will need to have different names, domains, and source tags. When conducting source reporting, be sure to factor in whether you have multiple source tags ultimately linking back to the same agency.
Example
Acme Corp uses Agency A as an external recruitment partner. Acme Corp has one confidential posting and three non-confidential postings they need to outsource to Agency A. In Lever, they set up Agency A as two separate agencies - one to which they can assign the confidential posting, and one to which they assign the non-confidential postings. In the agencies manager, Agency A appears as two agencies with distinct names, domains, and source tags. John Smith is used as the primary contact for both agencies.
When filtering by source in the pipeline and Visual Insights, Acme Corp uses both source tags to return opportunity data for candidates submitted by Agency A.
Multiple source tags for the same agency in the 'Sources' pipeline filter
Working with multiple recruiters at the same agency
In some cases, an agency may need to spread your assigned postings across more than one of their recruiters. If you wish to manage the assignment of postings to individual agency recruiters from within Lever, you will need to configure separate agencies with the individual recruiters serving as the primary contact for each respective agency. Keep in mind that the same limitations as described above regarding the replication of agencies would still apply - i.e. each agency must have a different name, domain, and source tag. In cases where postings are split between a large number of agency recruiters, replicating the agency for each individual recruiter can make things unwieldy when it comes to posting management and source reporting. As an alternative, agencies can consider setting up a shared inbox to serve as the primary contact for their agency in Lever. Agencies that pursue this option should keep in mind that each agency recruiter would need to have access to the inbox, and the agency would be responsible for the assignment of postings to individual their individual recruiters.
Example
Acme Corp uses Agency A as an external recruitment partner. Agency A has five different recruiters that manage the portfolio of postings assigned to them by Acme Corp. Agency A sets up a shared inbox for the team of five recruiters that manage Acme Corp's portfolio - team@agencya.com. Acme Corp adds that email address in the primary contact field when configuring Agency A in Lever.
Anyone at Agency A with access to the team@agencya.com inbox will also be able to access the custom page of postings assigned by Acme Corp. Agency A's recruitment coordinator then manually allocates the postings in the Acme Corp portfolio to individual recruiters within the agency. Daily status emails are sent to the team@agencya.com inbox. When filtering by source in the pipeline or Visual Insights, Acme Corp knows that the opportunities returned will be reflective of candidates submitted by all five of the recruiters at Agency A.
Recruiters assigning postings to agencies
Although recruiters are typically the ones generating postings, only users with Super Admin or Admin level access have the ability to assign postings to agencies. Since agencies normally incur a cost to their client organization based the volume of postings assigned to them, the ability to assign postings to an agency is reserved to those with budgetary discretion at their organization. If the recruiters at your organization regularly manage postings that are assigned to agencies, make sure that you have defined a process whereby they can request that a member of their team with Super Admin or Admin level access assigns their new posting(s) to the appropriate agency as part of their posting publication process.