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What do companies want from their Executive Search partners
Recruiting & Staffing
What do companies want from their Executive Search partners
Exchange ideas about sourcing, screening, interviewing, finding passive candidates, measuring your results, and more.
I wanted to get some responses to this subject from this forum. We are in the Search business and would like to constantly improve our service offering.
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Forums » Topic Forums » Recruiting & Staffing » What do companies want from their Executive Search partners
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What do companies want from their Executive Search partners
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What do companies want from their Executive Search partners
posted at 10/25/2006 5:24 AM EDT
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Posts: 3870
First: 2/12/2002 Last: 11/2/2009 |
Three things come immediately to mind.
One, companies want a search consultant who is knowledgeable about their business or, at the very least, about the function (ex, finance, operations, etc). The more the consultant knows about their industry, the more comfortable they'll feel about giving you their business. Second, rapid response. Communications with the client is vital and should be done on a weekly basis. I've seen way too many search agreements produce activity for the first 3 months and then just die. And since the search fees are paid off in the first three months, guess what the chances are that the search firm is going to do more for the client beyond the three months? By six months, if the position has not been filled, the search firm basically walks away from it. Third, use knowledgeable recruiters for the client contact. Too many search firms here in the US have used sales people to get the business in the guise of account managers. Since these are sales people instead of real live recruiters, there won't be nearly the rate of successful assignment completion as there would be if your account managers are recruiters. I've had one industry insider tell me that he'd be very surprised if the top two publicly traded search firms were completing more than 50% of their assignments just because of that. And here's my own personal observation, and that involves fees. In the old pre-Internet days, the client was buying the search firms Rolodex of contact names that had been painstakingly built over the years. The client was also buying a large research staff which would spend hours on the phone networking to find candidates. With the right access to databases and some reasonably good Internet savvy researchers, search firms should be able to reduce the time spent in finding candidates by over 50%. I know I have. So the question is how do executive search firms justify their 33% commissions any longer? Answer: they can't. The only reason they continue to do so is because they have a bunch of clients already paying that, and lowering their rates will cause huge howls of protest. And, of course, the publicly traded ones won't because their stock prices will go straight into the can. In my opinion, companies are starting to figure this out and hiring their own internal executive search consultants. And with management talent predicted to become increasingly scarce within the next few years, that may be the prudent way to go. |
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What do companies want from their Executive Search partners
posted at 10/26/2006 11:44 AM EDT
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Posts: 19
First: 2/7/2006 Last: 10/26/2006 |
On a high-end search (true executive positions, not project managers, not professional level) it's all about results.
results = the right person, within agreed upon time frame and performed confidentially and professionally. If your looking for a differentiator I can't think of anything more important than results. How you get your results might be your competitve advantage. |
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What do companies want from their Executive Search partners
posted at 10/26/2006 5:30 PM EDT
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Posts: 13
First: 10/24/2006 Last: 12/19/2006 |
Thanks a ton, Carl. I completely agree with all the points you made. In fact, the two most critical in my experience have been
(1) communication - the entire relationship between the search consultant and the client changes from being a vendor to that of a team working jointly to acheive a common goal through continuous communication, and (2) fees are definitely going to come under a lot of scrutiny and very soon, just like they did in the advertising industry a few years ago. And finally, results of course are the final differentiator - as they say, you're only as good as your last assignment. However, I do know of situations in our firm where even if a result has not been delivered in the committed time frame due to whatever reason, as long as we kept the communication channels wide open and let the client know what was happening, the client stayed with us. Thanks for your inputs, both of you. |
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