How to know when to look beyond your in-house recruiting team for your hiring needs

There are times when your internal recruiting team is completely capable of finding your next hire, but there are also times when you need to outsource to an Executive Search firm. We’ve broken down the situations where you may need to look to other recruiters – and why – to help you find just the right candidates for your hiring needs.

Focus

Your in-house recruiting team should be focused on the core operations of your business. That includes focusing on the roles for your industry, the specific hiring needs of these candidates, and many times, the other day-to-day human resources needs of your hires and employees.

• If you’re a consumer products company, your recruiters should be focused on manufacturing, logistics and marketing candidates.
• If you’re a technology company, your recruiters should be focused on programmers, engineers, data analysts, and related specialties.
• If you’re a public accounting firm, your recruiters should be focused on how to attract the best candidates to your firm, a thorough understanding of your competitors, and how to benefit most from recruiting on college campuses.

Creating a partnership with an Executive Search firm who can help you look for anything beyond your core operations is the best way to maximize your resources, so your in-house recruiting team can focus on where they’re needed most.

Specialty

If your in-house recruiting team is focused on the core operations of your business, it is certainly not the best use of their time to have them recruit for roles outside this focus. If they do, they will be starting their recruiting cycle from scratch, since they will not have a pool of candidates. Unfortunately, this is when the quality of the candidate pipeline is usually at its lowest – at the beginning and under a time-crunch. Your internal recruiters will end up spending most of their time and focus on the low-hanging fruit through online job boards, filtering through hundreds of applicant submissions hoping they find a few that might fit.

For example, every company has accounting and finance needs, but not every in-house recruiting team has the pool of candidates and expertise to fill those roles. This is an instance when it would be beneficial to partner with an Executive Search firm that specializes in accounting and finance to help you fill those specific roles.

In addition to knowing what skills are most valuable and what questions to ask, experienced recruiters at Executive Search firms can save you from wasting your time and resources if they already specialize in a discipline outside of your core business, because they are:

• already familiar with the strengths, skill levels and technical needs of candidates and roles in that specialty
• already recruiting the candidates in that specialty that you would need to spent weeks, if not months, to reach
• already have a network of qualified professionals who are not actively looking, but would make a move for the right opportunity
• already have a strong understanding of each candidate’s motivations

Perspective

In addition to a relatively constant stream of candidates already being sourced for other roles in that discipline, recruiters in Executive Search firms have a unique perspective beyond that of your internal hiring team, since they have invested time in building relationships and developing trust with the candidates in their discipline. Recruiters at Executive Search firms can function as valuable career counselors, so candidates are more inclined to share both positive and negative details about the recruiting process with them.

In other words, partnering with an external recruiter can provide you with a unique perspective. They are privy to feedback that candidates are unlikely to share with a potential employer, such as if someone on your team needs to change their interview style to better attract candidates or other feedback about their experience with your company.

Along the same lines, the candidate is more likely to trust the external recruiter and not see the information they provide about a company or role as a ‘sales pitch,’ since they have developed a relationship and a certain rapport with each other.

External recruiters also have a different perspective of the hiring landscape, since they are working with many different companies in their specific discipline. They are keenly aware of such things as:

• the number of comparable opportunities available
• competitive salary ranges, benefits and perks for similar roles
• current trends in hiring those specific roles

With more than 35 years of working with companies and candidates in the Los Angeles accounting and finance industry, the team at Pacific Executive Search is ready to help you and your team make the right hires in this specialization. We have the expertise, relationships and perspective to match your needs with the wants and needs of available talent. Give us a call. We’re here to help!