If you’re in the process considering using a recruiting firm in order to find sales and marketing talent for your company, you may know that there are at least a couple of options out there for you to consider when it comes to the type of arrangement between yourself and an executive search firm. One is retained and the other is contingent. By retained we mean you are working exclusively with the search firm and you’re paying their fees as you go for performing those services. Contingent means that you only pay the fees at the time they successfully place a candidate in the position that you’re looking to fill. The notion of exclusive verses non-exclusive is a different one though in contingent search. Many companies do contingent search, but they want to know that they are building an exclusive partnership with their client for the assignments that they’re taking on. If you are thinking about outsourcing your recruiting to a search firm, you should consider doing it on an exclusive basis as opposed to hiring several recruiting firms to do it simultaneously. Why? Because you’ll get the best results.
Many companies make the mistake of outsourcing their searches to a group of firms, thinking that they’ll get better coverage of potential candidates, but in fact, the results is a number of search firms are really giving them no quality attention on their job orders.
If you want a recruiting firm to do a great job for you in finding the best talent for your company, then you should consider giving the assignment to a firm which you believe has the best overall candidate pool and skills in the functional area that you’re looking for. In particular, you should retain the services of the company that focuses on sales and marketing if that’s what you’re looking for, in finance or IT or whatever the specialty is according to your search. But as you retain the services of the search firm, make sure that you’re willing to invest yourself in the process and in the relationship that you’re creating with its people. That will give you the best potential to find top candidates.
Why is this? It’s simple. Recruiting firms that don’t work exclusively on their assignments tend to take on a lot of searches simultaneously, and their efforts get diluted to the point where they are doing a little bit of a lot for everybody, but nothing really well in particular. This is the risk that you run when you pull in multiple recruiting companies to do a single search for you, particularly for higher-level positions in sales and marketing. Now it might be fine if you do this for staffing administrative positions, but when it comes to finding that A-level candidate for a very specialized sales or marketing position, you really want to make sure that your search firm is a partner of yours, that they understand your needs deeply and are willing to take a very focused approach to finding and vetting candidates according to your detailed search criteria. That’s why it makes a lot of sense, whether you go contingent or retained, that you pursue an exclusive partnering approach with the recruiting company that you decide to work with.
recruiting
employment
executive search
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Labels: recruiting