Executive search is not "recruitment"

Over the last decade or so, many businesses have grown their in-house talent teams so as to deliver a greater proportion of their recruitment needs themselves. Given the continued trend towards business process outsourcing this could be viewed as surprising, but that’s another story.

Some companies include executive level recruitment within the remit of these talent teams. However, this has not always gone so well – for example, one large international business I know experienced a threefold increase in the number of director level and above vacancies it had in the nine months after it brought executive recruitment in-house.

Executive recruitment is not like hiring at other levels of seniority – candidates are typically not seeking new roles or active on job boards; people need to be identified and pursued in a manner that its truly compelling; advertisements are less effective; the whole process needs to be high-touch with strong communication and reinforcement at all stages. Really, executive search is sales, a skill that few in-house recruiters truly have. It’s also time and resource intensive, commodities that internal talent teams have in short supply.

The key thing to remember when hiring at executive level is that it’s not about finding a person for the role, it’s about finding *the* person. It’s no exaggeration that the difference between an average and the best executive can be millions in revenue.

A recent industry survey revealed that more leadership roles are filled by executive search consultancies than any other formal methodology (more even than internal promotion). This should really come as no surprise.

www.abaexecutive.com

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