Why Are Executive Recruiters Worth Their Fee?

Expertise

Nobody knows the employment marketplace better than a professional recruiter . . . nobody!

Street-smart recruiters already know the neighborhood - including the unlisted addresses so often overlooked by the insiders.

In-house human resources view the marketplace through an imperfect or mis-representative prism and “tunnel vision” is their occupational hazard.

Just as physicians are cautioned against treating members of their own families, so too is it folly for an in-house H/R professional to believe that they have an undistorted and unbiased picture of the employment landscape. .........They are also vulnerable to the pressures of internal politics and workplace cultural dimensions which do not hinder the outsider.

The Ability to Cast a Wider Net

A professional fisherman will always have more to show than a weekend angler. Recruiters are in the marketplace day in and day out. They know the un-fished coves, reefs and inlets.

The job-hunter bookshelves are filled with lore about the “hidden job market.” The same holds true for professional recruiters; they have a detailed roadmap to hidden talent sources which will never be accessed by newspaper ads, alumni associations, applicant databases, job boards or any of the other more familiar sources of people.

There are occasional pearls through these sources (and someone inevitably wins the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes too!), but you have to shuck an awful lot of smelly oysters to find them. Recruiters only give you oysters proven to contain pearls. Your only job is to determine which pearl is the best.

Want to catch what you’re fishing for? Hire a guide!

Cost Savings

There's a misconception among employers that the cost of a hire equals the cost of the ads or Internet postings run to attract the person hired. Nothing could be further from reality.

Try adding the items below to get the true cost and you’ll see how cost effective an outside recruiter can be:

• Salaries and benefits of the employment/recruiting staffs plus those of the line managers involved in the hiring activity (who are not productive in their normal job pursuits when they’re out recruiting)
• Travel, lodging and entertainment expenses of in-house recruiters
• Source development costs
• Overhead expenses including but not limited to telephone, office space, postage, PR literature, applicant database maintenance, reference checking, clerical costs to correspond with the hundreds of unqualified respondents, etc.

Unbiased Third Party Input

Contrary to what some believe, recruiters don’t try to put square pegs into round holes. Their stock-in-trade is their integrity and their reputation for finding someone better than you could have found for yourself.

For a mid to senior-level executive, the average recruiter may develop a “long list” of a hundred or more possibilities. Each must be called and evaluated against the position specifications as well as the personality “fit” with the company and the people with whom they will ultimately work. Once this is winnowed down to the “short list,” a more intensive interviewing process begins - to narrow the search down to a small panel of finalists for the client to review.

This process is not, as some believe, simply romping through the file cabinets, harvesting from the Monster lookalikes or putting the job opening out to others on the recruiter’s network with crossed fingers that someone good will show up.

It's highly unlikely that a professional recruiter will be plowing new ground with your opening. They deal within spheres of influence far more familiar with your needs than any internal recruiter, and more often than not, they view the finalists as people who are competent to solve client problems, rather than just fill an open slot in the organizational chart.

Because they want to do business with you again and again, they're looking for the “truly exceptional” rather than the “just satisfactory” so often supplied by in-house hirers.

Confidentiality

Advertising – or otherwise publicly proclaiming an opening – has distinct disadvantages:

• Its cost and demonstrated ineffectiveness for sensitive senior level openings
• The anxiety and apprehension created among your current employees who wonder why they aren’t being considered, or worry about newcomer transition problems.
• The possibility that it will alert competitors to a current weakness or void within the company.

Speed

The recruiting process is always faster through a search professional who's continually tapped into the talent marketplace. For every day a key opening remains unfilled, a company’s other employees must grudgingly do double-duty. And this doesn’t factor in the profit opportunities or competitive advantages lost to a company because a position remains unfilled.

Post-Hire Downtime

The ability to locate a person who can immediately “hit the ground running” with a minimum of ramp-up saves time after the hire. All too often, a new-hire selected through less effective sources requires several months of expensive training and orientation.

Reality

This is important. Professional recruiters can recognize, and have a duty to inform their clients, when they may be mistaken as to:

• The type of person they need
• The salary that's required to attract them
• The possibilitiy that “the solution” might lie in areas outside the traditional target industries

Raising these “reality points” may be something an internal recruiter is politically disinclined to do. Too many hirers fail to understand that a professional recruiter’s primary function is not to fill a slot; it's to provide the right candidate to solve a problem.

Negotiation

Master negotiator Herb Cohen says:

"Negotiation is the analysis of information, time and power to affect behavior . . . the meeting of needs (yours and others’) to make things happen the way you want them to.”

Acting as a buffer and an informed intermediary, the professional recruiter is able to blend the needs and wants of both parties to arrive at a mutually beneficial arrangement - without the polarizing roadblocks which too frequently materialize in face-to-face dealings.

Prioritizing company resources

It' amazing how much of company revenue is squandered on non-productive perks for existing high-level employees - while penny-pinch occurs in the area that every company’s lifeblood . . . talent acquisition.

Club memberships and the like may be fine, but no one with an IQ higher than Forrest Gump’s believes that these expenditures substantially contribute to a company’s profit margin.

But one well-placed employee can be the cause of a company’s profits skyrocketing. And the fee for having hired these people pales to insignificance when compared to the contributions they make to the bottom line.

The next time you think a recruiter’s fees are too high, put them in the proper perspective before asking for that Blue Light special or spinning your wheels thrashing about trying to fill vital openings with less effective (but not necessarily less expensive) methods.

Savvy executives learned long ago that the fee paid to a recruiter is a shrewd strategic investment, not an extraneous expense. They also know that the “best” is far different from the “best available.”