For many organizations the time is right to build capability within the talent acquisition function to recruit executive level talent. Globalization combined with aging leadership demographics imply that a majority of organizations will need to recruit a record number of external leadership candidates in years to come, the cost of which would be prohibitive if traditional third party executive recruiters were widely used. If your organization is contemplating bringing executive search in-house, you need to develop a plan that covers several key elements. Those elements include assessing various executive recruiting models, making the business case to senior leaders, identifying potential problems, and putting together metrics to measure/demonstrate the effectiveness of your executive search function. keep reading…
Tag: executivesearch
An Action Plan for Moving Executive Search Inside Corporations
The Benefits of Internal Executive Search and Why Now Is the Perfect Time to Make the Move
Now is the perfect time for organizations to bring executive search capability in-house. While the business case for this strategic shift has been clear for some time, ongoing cost-containment efforts combined with increasing demand for strategic staffing make now the perfect time to execute the shift and build out the tools/approaches needed.
In many organizations, executive search fees consume double-digit portions of the recruiting budget, yet produce results only 45% of the time. Few budget items are more costly and ineffective, but the motivations behind this shift are not solely monetary. Executing executive searches internally dramatically increases the business impact of the talent acquisition function and raises the visibility of talent acquisition as a key contributor to business performance significantly.
After all, what else in recruiting could possibly impact business results more than bringing in a high-quality, innovative executive capable of delivering market-changing increases in efficiency and effectiveness?
The increase in “face time” between talent acquisition and the executive committee further increases the function’s ability to sell the vision of the organization and sustain operations when budgets get tight. In the following section, you will find numerous arguments supporting the shift.
When you add up all the positive benefits, it’s hard to argue that there will be a better time to explore this strategic move. keep reading…
A Job Fair With a Sports Playbook And Hollywood Hype
Think there’s not much about recruiting you haven’t seen or heard? How about a NFL-style draft of experienced corporate leaders and MBAs?
That’s what a small group in Washington State is proposing and for no less a location than New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, where the National Football League draft is conducted.
Here’s the game plan, according to Corporate Draft and its organizers, Nolan Wheeler and Mike Gazdag:
Fifty companies are to pay $30k each to have a crack at 2,000 fully vetted veteran senior corporate managers and executives and 500 MBAs. There’s to be two days of “meet and greet” followed by two days of draft picks, during which the participating companies get to “draft” one of the hopefuls sitting in the Music Hall audience.
The companies, who also are present in the Music Hall, get five minutes to make a pick. When they do, they telephone their selection to the draft staff which delivers a custom stitched jersey to the master of ceremonies while the lucky job seeker is escorted to the stage as their 30 second video backgrounder is shown to the assemblage. keep reading…
The End of Transactional Executive Search
It’s true! Although some of us have been preaching this for years, it’s amazing how some top executive search firms have buried their heads in the sand and continue doing business as usual.
Why Aren’t Search Firms Out of Business?
Given that:
- Corporate recruiters have access to tens of thousands of active candidates via job boards and specialized career sites.
- Corporate recruiters have access to information about tens of thousands of inactive candidates via a variety of Web tools ranging from Google to ZoomInfo to LinkedIn.
- Thousands of corporate recruiters have been certified in advanced sourcing techniques from firms like AIRS and the Adler Group.
- ATS and hiring management systems not only house customized resume databases, but they also enable recruitment processes to be streamlined so that recruiters are able to spend less time on operational details and more time delivering value-added services to hiring managers.
- Once the sole resource of search firms, research, and sourcing firms provide rapid candidate generation services to corporate recruiters at affordable prices.
…Why aren’t search firms out of business?
Korn/Ferry: A “Clean Beat”
Korn/Ferry’s doing better than expected, results R.W. Baird analyst Mark Marcon calls “a clean beat” of expectations. The stock was up sharply Tuesday.
Some thoughts in an email from Marcon on the world’s largest executive search company.
Average fee/search increased a very strong 15%.
Growth is clearly decelerating — from +26% in FQ2, +22% in FQ3, +16% in FQ4.
Futurestep also had a solid quarter, and continues to make good progress of improving its operating margin. Revenue increased 22% and operating margin expanded from 8.1% to 9.2%. (Futurestep is the RPO division; it’s about 14% of the company.)
North America and EMEA, two largest segments, were significantly better than expected, while Asia-Pac was disappointing. The only real negative was Asia-Pac.
South America performed well, but is small.
Korn/Ferry’s top executives also talked about the business, the economy in general, and more, during a conference call.
Bringing Outside Search In
The biotech firm Invitrogen has formed a new in-house team with the mandate of filling at least 10 executive (director and above) searches this year that would have gone to an outside, retained search firm. It hopes to save a half-mil in search fees (an initiative that Invitrogen’s James Seetoo goes into more detail about in the July Journal).
Here’s a look at Seetoo’s “SWOT” chart when it comes to moving search in.
A Tale of Two Searches
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
This past quarter, I conducted two senior-level management searches. Each one stands out as a shining example of what to do and what not to do. Understanding the differences can double your monthly placement rate in about half the time. Before reading the details, you should benchmark your own recruiting skills using this 10-Factor Recruiter diagnostic assessment to get a sense of what it takes to be a great recruiter.
10 Ways to Supercharge Your Search for Candidates
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines research as a “careful or diligent search,” a “studious inquiry or examination,” and “the collecting of information about a particular subject.” Why is it, then, that most executive search and recruiting professionals so often think of research as mere “name generation?” “Name gen” is rarely careful, diligent, or studious. More often, it involves a relatively haphazard scooping up of names and titles, willy-nilly. And that leads to a “kiss every frog” approach to recruiting in order to find your prince.
As the execution engine of executive search, your research can be either a Ferrari or an Edsel, a car that failed spectacularly due to poor workmanship and a failure to understand the American consumer. The Ferrari is Human Capital Intelligence: research that, through analysis, is transformed into actionable intelligence to provide your search with a competitive advantage. When you embed intelligence into virtually every step of your search process, you dramatically improve search performance. I’m not suggesting that you work harder. I am suggesting that by doing the following 10 steps, you can work smarter so you don’t have to work as hard.
A Cure for the Sounds of Silence
Two recruiters called me last month to offer recruiting assistance on a particular project they heard my company was working on. This was a routine search in the $50,000 to $60,000 range that we had filled hundreds of times before. In this particular instance, however, we were caught in a backlog.
The recruiters were right about the period of time being longer than usual. Since both were esteemed individuals I’ve known and respected for well over 10 years, I decided to invest about a half hour with each to fully explain the search.
