Why most organisations engage a recruitment partner to handle Executive Recruitment

Engaging a professional recruitment business to look after your executive recruitment is a smart move.

Every hiring moment is an opportunity to transform your business - making the right executive appointment can have an incredible impact on the future of your organisation.

It’s no secret that making the wrong hiring decisions can be costly.

Estimates of the cost of hiring the wrong person range from 30 to 150% of their salary. Even at 30%, that’s a mistake to be avoided. Getting executive recruitment right is worth investing in.

1. Reach, technology resources

Engaging and attracting top talent is a recruiter’s day job. And hopefully, something they are passionate about.

Recruiters spend extensive time and effort cultivating long-term relationships, building and nurturing their network. This network is the starting point for promoting your opportunity and includes both a talent database and their social media networks and reach.

Specialist recruitment businesses also have access to specific technology, networks, membership organisations and specialist job boards to reach specific audiences.

Ideally your recruitment partner also has dedicated copywriting resources in their team, so they can craft compelling recruitment marketing and advertising content to promote your role.

2. Time

A robust, effective recruitment process involves a significant investment of time to identify, evaluate, screen and interview a large number of candidates.

When you’re making an important hiring decision, you want to select from the best possible pool of top quality talent. Do you want to hire the best person in a pool of 100-150 candidates - or the best for a small pool of 5?

Evaluating and interviewing candidates takes time. Most leaders don’t have time to evaluate a large pool of talent and compare large sets of candidate data.

Because this is a recruiter’s ‘day job’, they not only have more time to dedicate to your recruitment process, they’ll be more efficient at this process.

3. Expertise

Do you know where to find the talent you’re looking for?

More often than not, the best talent is not actively seeking their next role, which means they’re not looking on job boards or LinkedIn.

Unless your organisation has the expertise and resources internally to tap into passive talent pools (and approach them appropriately), you’ll need a recruitment partner to do this for you.

4. Guarantee

Recruitment is a professional service. Your recruitment partner will provide a replacement guarantee ie an assurance that the person you hire fits the brief, is engaged with your organisation and the role - and will stay.

Standard recruitment guarantees for executive placements are usually 3 to 6 months. You can read more about recruitment guarantees in this article. Of course when you manage your executive recruitment directly, there is no guarantee.

5. Finally, look at your onboarding process

Finding, attracting and engaging great people is only the beginning. Providing a supported, positive and flexible onboarding experience is critical to employee engagement and retention.

If you’re working in a hybrid office and remote working model, take into consideration how this might impact the early days and weeks for your new employee.

Things to consider and questions to ask before engaging an executive recruiter

Engaging a recruitment business to handle your executive recruitment is an investment. It’s also a collaborative partnership between recruiter and hiring team/employer.

Taking the time to conduct a detailed briefing at the beginning of this partnership is absolutely critical.

You can read about hirng a recruitment agency in this article, but here we’ll provide a checklist of some of the things we recommend you consider (and ask) before you kick off the engagement.

• Did your recruitment partner ask you to sign terms of business or an agreement?
• Did they take the time to take a detailed briefing from you? Asking lots of quality questions is the sign of a good recruitment partner. Be wary of a recruitment partner who doesn’t take a detailed brief - they’re going into the search without the data they need to drive the best result.
• Did they outline their search and recruitment plan and process in detail?

• Did they ask you for an exclusive partnership on this role and outline the fee structure and milestone payments?
• Did they explain the recruitment guarantee clearly?
• Did they manage your expectations in terms of timing?
• Are they happy to provide you with references from other previous clients/customers?

Finally, always ensure you have a recruitment guarantee in place.

A recruitment guarantee is your warranty. It’s important to know what happens if the person you hire doesn’t work out.

The guarantee will be clearly stated in either the terms of business or your agreement. For more information about understanding guarantees, see this article.

Speak to Gerard Kerr About Executive Recruitment

Gerard Kerr is Co-Founder and General Manager of Search and Selection at Kingston Human Capital.

With more than 20 years’ experience in recruitment, Gerard has deep networks and extensive expertise managing complex search and selection projects across a range of sectors including local state and federal government, statutory authorities, government-owned corporations and ASX-listed companies.

Here are some of our success stories

Finding needles in haystacks is what we do best. We use traditional and algorithmic-search techniques, video recruitment, and behavioural economics to find you the best talent in the market.

• Case Study: Finding a Visionary Leader for Queensland Music Festival
• Case Study: Recruiting Screen Queensland's Chief Executive Officer
• Case Study: Recruiting the next Executive Director for the Department of Environment and Science (DES)
  

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