I'm sure we all know new hires that looked great on paper, that aced the interview, then didn't work out as expected.

Bad hires are one of the key risks in recruitment, problematic at a junior level and potentially disastrous for critical vacancies.

It goes to follow that when you talk to recruitment suppliers, establishing their retention rate (stickability in my pillars of recruitment) should be as important as their fill rate.

A compelling recruiter may be able to fill your vacancy, but have they done the work that minimises the risk of hiring the wrong person?

Yet promises are one thing, with a declaration of an 87% fill rate and a 99.9% people in place after 2 years rate.

But how can you drill deeper and see how those rates are achieved if indeed they are?

It comes down to insight. Establishing the reality of your culture and context, what your needs are from your vacancy, and what good actually looks like a candidate.

It also comes down to partnership. With partnership comes mutual obligation, and the opportunity to challenge you constructively if you are getting things wrong.

These are the building blocks of hiring the right people that can make a difference over the long term.

And you can assess the effectiveness of your recruiter in these areas in two ways.

From the questions we ask and from how we interpret the answers with meaning for our candidate marketplace.

The first is simple enough, assuming you meet your suppliers. What questions do we ask you?

The second can be measured in two ways. One by us reporting back of our understanding of the vacancy, either through an executive summary or through our job adverts.

Further to that, you can ask the candidates we submit what they think of us when you interview them.

You'll quickly get to the truth of how we can help.

By the way, in 11 years of trading, I've been asked to honour my 12-month free replacement guarantee for retained vacancies twice.

If you want a better chance of your key hires sticking around long enough to give you a suitable return on investment, give someone like me a call.