What is a service level agreement?
A service level agreement, usually shortened to SLA, is the part of a contract that defines the performance standard a supplier commits to, how it will be measured, and what happens when it is missed. Response times, delivery times, availability, quality thresholds, with a consequence attached.
The consequence is the part that makes it an agreement. A set of targets with no effect when they are missed is a report, and it should be called one.
What do recruitment SLAs usually measure, and what should they?
They usually measure speed, because speed is easy to count. Time to acknowledge a vacancy, time to first submission, number of CVs within five working days. All of it is genuinely measurable and none of it says whether the hire was any good.
What matters more is harder to instrument: the proportion of submitted candidates who reach interview, the proportion of offers accepted, and retention at twelve months. Those describe quality rather than activity. An SLA built only on submission speed reliably produces fast submissions of candidates nobody wants to meet, which is exactly what it was designed to reward.
What makes an SLA enforceable in practice?
Three things that are often missing. An agreed measurement source, so both sides read the same number rather than arguing about whose system is right. A defined exclusion list, covering delays caused by the client, because a supplier cannot be held to a submission deadline while waiting for an interview slot.
And a consequence proportionate enough to be applied. Service credits that are trivial get ignored; penalties large enough to threaten the engagement get renegotiated the first time they trigger. The workable middle is a credit that is felt and a review mechanism that escalates repeated failure, rather than a single dramatic clause nobody intends to use.
Where does the SLA sit relative to the rest of the contract?
Inside the framework agreement in most cases, or annexed to it, because it governs how the relationship performs rather than what any single engagement contains. The statement of work defines what is delivered; the SLA defines the standard the delivery is held to.
One boundary is worth keeping clear. An SLA is a contractual commitment with a remedy. A KPI is a measurement that informs a conversation. Organisations routinely describe KPIs as SLAs, which raises expectations that the contract does not actually support, and the gap shows up at the first serious miss. Sparagus works to client service levels within its managed services and contract management engagements.
