Building Trust With Your Vendor | Transition Staffing Group

Building a Partnership

Take a moment and think about your partnerships. Personal and professional, what do most successful partnerships have in common? I would put trust at the top of my list. How do you establish trust? A great way to start is communication. Communicating shared thoughts, strategies, goals and general expectations surrounding your partnership.

In the recruiting business, we experience all kinds of interactions with client companies looking to hire talent and candidates looking for a new job opportunity. I can say emphatically, the most successful of these interactions begin with building a partnership.

For example, we were working with a client that has experienced some difficulties surrounding their growth aspirations. They are publicly traded and there is no hiding the fact that they are close to becoming a going concern. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t a great company or that they don’t have a solid culture, it means they need to solve some immediate cash flow issues.

Stick With It

It would be easy to walk away and work with our clients that don’t have this current blemish. But we have built trust with this company, they are open and honest with us as their staffing partner and together we strategize about what the right type of candidate looks like as they rebuild toward future growth. Not only have consistently been able to deliver high caliber talent, but our placements are also thriving because expectations were set early in the screening process and complete transparency was our first shared priority.

Clients who hold us at an arms-length or insist on engaging with several staffing vendors in an effort for us to “compete” for the best talent, simply cannot achieve long lasting or sustained results. This is because there isn’t a shared vision and there certainly isn’t trust being built.

Of course, building trust takes time. But what if trust is the number one value when engaging a new vendor. What if we lead with trust from the onset? Can we expedite the process of building rapport, strategy and trust?

I believe the answer is yes, but the goal must be lockstep. I have listed below, a few easy steps to quickly building trust with your new vendor.

4 Easy Steps to Quickly Build Trust

Do a quick Google search on the company you are planning on doing business with. If their brand doesn’t align with your values, trust may not come easily.
If you are looking for a true long-term partnership, ask to speak with a current client or two. You want to be sure they can deliver to your expectations.
Be vulnerable. Talk about the struggles you are experiencing or the goals you must accomplish. It’s ok to not be in control, a true partner will understand, and they will calibrate appropriately.
Share that you want a long-term partnership, and this is not simply a transaction. With this transparency, your new vendor will be excited at the prospect of investing additional time and effort.

Of course, the list could go on, but this is a great place to start a potential long-term partnership. In this day and age of endless options, I get the most satisfaction and results from working with the ones I trust the most.

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