What makes headhunters and great executive search people successful? Their golden tongues? Their superior intelligence? No. It’s their network of contacts that enable them to find the best people in a field quickly. Most executive recruiters pride themselves on the network they have built over years of work. They know people who know people, and that is what keeps them going. These lists are carefully guarded and are considered proprietary information. It’s the stuff that makes the difference between finding the ideal candidate and failing. But, there is one downside to executive recruiting: they seldom know your business as well as you do. And they rarely have the depth of knowledge about a particular person’s abilities that comes from being both an expert in the field and as good judge of people as you might be. Only the hiring manager or a person closely connected to the manager knows exactly what they want. This makes the in-house recruiter the best person to use to locate talent but the limitations of an in-house recruiter are also significant. They don’t have the depth of network in a particular field that the executive recruiter has nor do most of them have the time to focus. They are fielding too many candidates in too many fields. Some progressive companies – albeit mostly in high tech – have begun to deal with this in a much more systematic way. Here are some of their ideas (I can’t mention who these Companies are because this technique is considered a trade secret):
Today’s labor environment requires these seemingly expensive and time-consuming methods. When you add up the cost of not filling a position for a month or two, the expense involved in maintaining a competitive intelligence system is very small.
