A London-based advertising agency has taken a proactive approach to getting what it wants from its recruitment suppliers – by inviting them in to discuss its employer brand.

Grey London, which has developed ad campaigns for household names such as Pantene, Flash and Twix, invited around 30 consultants and managers from its supply base to a breakfast meeting last week to discuss its HR policies and convey the atmosphere in which new recruits would be working.

Liz Nottingham (pictured), head of the People Team at Grey, organised the meeting so agencies could get to know the firm better and ensure that it was fairly represented in the competitive media recruitment marketplace.

“Too often the relationship with a recruitment agency is about getting a vacancy, sending over a job spec and then they deal with it,” explained Nottingham. “There’s far more to the process than that.”

One consultant attending the briefing said: “It’s good for us to be able to give our candidates as positive a picture as possible.”