How Headhunters Can Get the Candidate You Desire

Hiring the right people for the job is both a skill in itself and a tricky time-consuming task. Add in a touch of the green-eyed monster over your competitor’s employees and success, you can be left wondering how to achieve the recruitment goals you seek.

As an in-house recruiter, in HR or a senior management role, you’re going to find yourself pondering how best to truly attract and hunt down exceptional talent. For executive roles, this will inevitably mean considering a more unique approach.

The conundrum of executive roles

Certain roles are easier to fill. Furthermore, certain roles are less of a risk factor in terms of getting it wrong. You can fill junior positions relatively easily with minimal effort. Cost of recruitment should be low. What’s more, if you make the wrong choice minimal harm is likely, and you can quickly move onwards and upwards.

For executive level roles the pressure mounts. Hiring the right people for the job at this level comes with palpitation inducing stakes. Firstly, your pool of potential is smaller. You also don’t just want potential, you want proven success. Secondly, the individual costs more to recruit. Thirdly, they cost more to replace if you make a mistake. Fourthly, those costs include some fairly nasty hidden ones such as overall performance reduction.

Add into this that you’re seeking recruitment at a level where you are likely keenly aware of what your competitors are up to. This gives you a great feel-good factor when you realise their CEO is winding down to retirement. However, it makes you panic when you realise that their customer service director is delivering returns on their metrics which make you green at the gills.

In short, executive roles take a special approach when it comes to recruitment and are accompanied with high stakes for getting it wrong.

The conundrum of recruitment strategies

When you take the above pressures into consideration, you suddenly feel the weight of getting the recruitment strategy right. Coming into play here will be two huge factors: cost and time.

Recruitment is a tricky customer because getting it wrong costs you both in terms of time and money. Very few in-house recruiters, even within HR, have the time to really invest in their recruitment to the degree it really needs. You simply have too many other demands on your time. If you could throw money at it this wouldn’t be such a problem. However, realistically you need to keep recruitment costs down.

This is where this conundrum gets more complicated. Upfront costs of recruitment don’t tell the whole story. It’s easy to plump for the cheapest option, job boards for example, and fail to realise that the long-term costs hit in reduced profitability or re-spending on the same role in the future.

So how do you go about hiring the right people for the job?

Importantly, you need to face these conundrums head on. Don’t bury your head in the sand and hope that for you, and your vacancy, will get lucky. Luck rarely happens in recruitment, especially in headhunting. Strategy is what ensures you hire the right person for that executive position.

This requires taking a more realistic, but also optimistic, approach to recruitment at the executive level. This is especially true if you’ve already got your eye on the prize (someone else’s successful employee).

A realistic strategy is to get a headhunter on the task for you. The initial costs may be slightly more but you’ll quickly realise that you recoup this on long-lasting value-adding senior staff.

Headhunters can invest the time and resources you don’t have to get you the executives you need who will drive your business forward. Yes, this is down to networking and connecting with talent in your industry, something which can be immensely difficult for those already on the inside. And yes, it’s also down to coaxing those passive candidates who are already delivering in their current role, in the way that you want in yours, to become active candidates for you.

However, it’s also about having the insight into what you really need to grow and be successful. That’s where a headhunter will make sure that you’re not just hiring the right people for the job, but investing in tomorrow’s growth, potential and strength.

Headhunters aren’t your average recruitment strategy. As a result they don’t yield average results. They yield recruitment results which set you apart from your competitors.