Talent partnerships
Use a supplier scorecard that improves the partnership
Build a supplier scorecard around the outcomes and behaviours your hiring process needs. Combine delivery evidence with submission relevance, candidate communication, accuracy, responsiveness, and useful market learning. Define each measure, review context alongside numbers, and agree improvement actions. Avoid universal targets or rankings that ignore role difficulty, client delays, and changes in scope.
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Start with the purpose of review
Decide whether the scorecard supports a live search conversation, a periodic supplier review, renewal, or allocation of future work. Each needs different evidence. A weekly operational view should be short and actionable; a broader partnership review can examine patterns and capability. Tell suppliers how the information will be used before collecting it.
Define measures in plain language
Possible measures include agreed updates delivered, submissions that meet must-have evidence, candidate status communication, accuracy of records, interview conversion with context, and insights that changed the search. Define numerator, denominator, time period, and owner where numbers are used. Do not attach an invented good threshold; establish expectations from the engagement and review actual patterns together.
Include the client's contribution
Record manager feedback time, interview availability, brief changes, approval delays, and candidate information supplied by the company. This prevents a supplier score from becoming a one-sided account of a shared process. It also reveals fixes the internal team controls. A partner should still be accountable for its work, but the evidence must show the conditions around it.
- Submission relevance with examples
- Candidate communication and record accuracy
- Agreed update and escalation behaviour
- Search learning that changed an action
- Client decisions or delays affecting delivery
Turn a score into a conversation
Illustrative example: an agency sends many profiles for a finance role but few reach interview. The review does not stop at a low conversion line. Sample submissions show the manager began requiring transformation ownership that was absent from the brief. The company updates the requirement, the agency recalibrates three profiles, and both track relevance from that point rather than blaming the historical total.
End with owned actions
Choose one or two improvements, each with an owner, evidence, and review date. Examples include a new submission format, earlier candidate updates, or a manager calibration session. Preserve qualitative examples beside metrics so unusual searches remain interpretable. If performance remains weak after clear feedback and support, use the agreed escalation or exit path with a documented candidate handover. Keep historical views when definitions or scope change. Otherwise a revised brief can make recent delivery look worse or better without the supplier doing anything differently. Annotate the change, reset the relevant comparison point, and explain the business reason so the scorecard remains a fair operating record. Invite the supplier to challenge inaccurate data before the review decision, with a defined window and evidence route.
Next step
Draft five measures for one supplier, define each precisely, add the client's matching responsibility, and use the first review to agree two owned improvements.