Posts in Category: Employment
How Do I Sort Through All the Executive Recruitment Agencies?
If you are looking for new members in your organization to fill executive positions, there are several options available for you: you can recruit internally, promoting one of your employees from a lower-level position; you can advertise the job opening the same way as you would advertise your other positions or you can turn to an executive recruitment agency. Unfortunately, internal recruiting is not an option for every company and finding your next executive can also be problematic as most great executives either do not seek a new job actively or, if they do, they find a new position in a matter of minutes, so turning to a recruiting expert might just be the right solution for your organization, too. Here are some tips how to pick the best recruitment agency from all the great, specialized companies available in your area.
Identify the Exact Criteria that You Need Your Candidates to Fulfill
Determining the exact parameters for your candidates is essential for finding not only the new talent you need, but also the recruiters who will find that new talent for you. Make up your mind about what you want, identify the key tasks and responsibilities that come with the position as well as the personality traits, experience and qualification that you need your candidates to have.
Identify the Agencies that Have Experience in Recruiting for Your Industry Segment
Each industry segment is different, so the best executive recruitment agencies to turn to are companies that have experience in working for clients in your segment. One of the most efficient ways to identify such industries is to tap into your network of industry colleagues to ask them to provide you recommendations and opinions about the agencies that they have used. You can also talk to your top-level executives to find out whether they have ever been recruited by such an agency.
Other methods to identify suitable agencies is to use online resources. There are many recruiter directories that you can access for free or for a small fee, you can search for suitable companies on employment-oriented platforms or you can carry out your own research on your preferred search engines to carry out a local search for the company websites of recruiters.
Interview Agencies
When you have a list with three or four agencies that seem suitable based on your preliminary research, contact the agencies and schedule a meeting. During the meeting, ask questions about how long the company has been in the business, about their experience in recruiting top talent for your niche, about the recruitment processes that they use to identify, to approach and to evaluate candidates, about their fee structure as well as about how they handle the interviewing processes. Take notes during each meeting and compare your notes before you make the final decision. Try to think about the impressions that the agency’s representative has made on you and only hire a company that inspires you trust and that you can imagine turning to with your future executive openings as well.
What Makes a Great Head Hunter?
What are the skills that a good recruiter has to master today? These skills become more obvious by contrast, if we look at the evolution of the changes that the recruitment went through in time.
A great head hunter needs to know psychology
At one point, we started talking about job rotation and job enhancement, as solutions to the monotony of a small job that had to be done daily, for a lifetime. Few realized, but that was the moment when individuals began to count in the work equation and were not treated anymore as robots. Their conscious and feelings started to count and could not be neglected anymore. As labor has become less and less enslaving, the recruiter’s mission got a little more complicated. Most of the job announcements contained a phrase like “ability to work under stress conditions”, except that there was no device which could measure how much stress a candidate could tolerate. The recruiter had to learn psychology and make a difference between people, according to their abilities and personality traits. Helping someone look for LICSW jobs MA opportunities, is different than assisting someone else in a search for operations jobs in CA. A great head hunter needs to know industries and locations to help people get the best jobs available.
A great head hunter has to adapt to each generation
At a certain moment, in HR, people started talking about a new concept: job satisfaction. Specialists agreed that people should like what they do because the professional satisfaction of the employees is directly and indirectly involved in labor productivity. The new generations – Millennials and Generation Z – do not compromise on this anymore; they will resign the next day if they don’t like the job. True, they have the advantage of the new technology which allows them to work from anywhere and anytime, in forms that no longer resemble the work of the past generations.
A great head hunter needs to see the value of each candidate
At present, we talk about the commitment of the employees, which is more than satisfaction; we talk about evolution and personal development through work, and we reinterpret the work in completely new, different formulas. Going to work for 8 hours a day, having an awful boss or retiring after doing the same job your entire life are history now.
A great head hunter needs to have knowledge about building an employer brand
Nowadays, a good recruiter has to master three activities perfectly: (1) Sourcing – knowing where to find good job candidates, especially in a deficient market, (2) Attracting Talent – emphasizing the benefits offered by the employer and attracting the right candidates, especially in a competitive market (3) Selection – knowing how to identify the right candidate by looking behind appearances.
Completely new recruitment skills: marketing and sales
It takes talent more than ever, people who can make a difference, who are proactive, have innovative ideas and think differently, because what is important for today’s companies is not to come out with a standard and cheap product, but to come up with disruptive ideas, to reinvent the rules of the game. In this context, good companies are fighting for good employees, but they must know how to attract them. The recruiter’s mission is changing, and it is more difficult and challenging than ever: head hunters still need to know psychology very well, but they must learn some new recruiting skills and competences that were not in the HR field 10 years ago: to become a marketing agent and a salesman at the same time, with solid knowledge of Social Media.