Recruiting today is experiencing a significant market shift. As talent demand continues to increase and the talent pool shrinks, it becomes much more difficult to locate and persuade A players to take a look at new opportunities.
We hear from clients across the country that job boards aren’t working anymore and that recruiters are not successfully identifying and delivering top talent. While the problem starts with the clients themselves – they have not changed their belief systems and hiring cultures to accommodate this new paradigm – the solution lies with us.
As professional executive search consultants, it is our responsibility to educate our clients about the best ways to achieve success in 2015 and beyond. A high-demand, low-supply market means that clients must whip themselves into fighting form to win the battle for top talent.
That is where we come in. We must make sure our clients are the winning teams, the ones who can beat not only competitors in their industry but also local companies vying for the same A players.
Many hiring authorities believe that more is better. As in, the more recruiters a company works with, the more candidates they will be able to choose from. But the reality is that clients who partner with a single recruiting firm will net the best results overall. Do you want three recruiting firms giving you 30% of their time or one giving you 100%?
When companies turn a search into a race by working with multiple contingency firms, they lose. Because as with any race, the participants are focused on one thing: speed.
Most contingency recruiters will try to cut corners to be the first to present a candidate. Many times, basic and essential steps in the process are ignored. Something as fundamental as making a phone call to a candidate to present the opportunity doesn’t happen. Recruiters shoot over database candidates to a client and if there is interest, then the recruiters – the ones who give us all a bad name, by the way – belatedly make the effort to reach out to the candidate. No pre-qualification. No quality.
What clients must understand is this: in the end, quality control still happens. But in this type of search, the client, not the recruiter, is the QC Mgr. When 10 times more candidates are presented to a client, it is 10 times more work for the client.
The hiring authority has to weed through the candidates and actually do the recruiters’ job for them. The result? Offer the job to the least offensive person from a lackluster pool of candidates and hope for the best. It is a process that simply doesn’t work in today’s marketplace.
The bad news is that one out of every two hires in this country today is a mishire, thanks in large part to outdated hiring practices. The good news is that this is where top recruiters break away from the pack.
They educate their clients about the many benefits of partnering with one firm, as opposed to playing the field. It is a partnership you are selling. When a professional relationship is developed between a recruiter and a client, there is time to gain a complete understanding of exactly what the client is looking for.
A targeted, detailed plan can be executed. The recruiter can develop a healthy brand identity for their clients in the talent marketplace, as opposed to sabotaging it by presenting the same opportunity to the same candidates in different ways.
Michael Eisner said: “A brand is a living entity – and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.” In no profession is this truer than ours.
The best recruiters pay attention to the many, many details that every search entails and deliver the best talent. The end result is higher-quality talent being hired, happier clients, and more successful business partnerships.
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Jon Bartos, a guest writer for the Top Echelon Recruiter Training Blog, is a premier writer, speaker, and consultant on all aspects of personal performance, human capital, and the analytics behind them. In 2010, Bartos founded Revenue Performance Management, LLC. The RPM Dashboard System is a business intelligence tool used worldwide for metrics management for individual and team performance improvement. In 2012, Bartos achieved national certification in Hypnotherapy, furthering his interest in learning the dynamics behind what motivates others to achieve higher levels of success. Click here to visit Bartos’s website.