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| CRBJ Home > January 2007 | |||||
Get the right recruiting firm for your needsBy Peter Gray
The short answer is that it's essential to select the recruiting firm that best matches your needs in a given situation. When filling temporary or administrative positions, the choice of a staffing firm can be fairly straightforward. The hiring needs come fairly often, and any mid-sized community has several local staffing firms, so employers can try them and settle on the one they like best, or use more than one. But when hiring for middle or senior ranks, selecting the right recruiting firm can be trickier. Finding management and skilled professional talent is a challenge that has grown steadily. Why? Traditionally we think of a company's workforce as a pyramid, with a large number of low-level staff, a middle number of mid-level professionals, and a few senior managers running the company. We expect employee turnover to be concentrated at the bottom, both because of the numbers and because there is a perception (perhaps unjustified) that turnover rates are higher among junior staff. However, several labor and business trends have redrawn this picture. One is the breakdown of employment stability and employer-employee loyalty, which has led to higher employee turnover at all levels. Another is the explosion of start-up ventures, which start out as management-heavy entities and can be short-lived. Still another is the advent of the "knowledge economy," with the growth of consulting and professional services firms and scientific research organizations. Knowledge-driven organizations are not shaped like pyramids; they bulge in the middle, and there is often a war for talent over the skilled professionals who occupy that middle bulge. How do you assess whether a recruiting firm can help you find an accountant who knows tax rules for property and casualty insurers; a life sciences intellectual property licensing expert; or a technology project manager with experience implementing a specific enterprise software package in the manufacturing industry? Three factors to consider are the recruiting firm's specialty, its location, and its size. It's crucial to work with a recruiter who understands the job he or she is to recruit for, in terms of the industry, professional function, and management level of the position. Recruiters and recruiting firms tend to specialize in narrow areas of business knowledge. Many recruiters are former professionals in a field who migrated over to recruiting for that field. The best evidence that a recruiter has the right specialty is a track record of having helped other employers fill such positions before. Recruiting has become a "virtual service" that can be done from anywhere, but there are clear advantages to working with a local partner who can interview candidates in person and promote the local area to candidates who need to be persuaded to relocate. But a trade-off often arises between the recruiting firm's location and its specialty. You may need to decide: Would you rather work remotely with an expert recruiter based in another city or state or work with a local generalist recruiter who needs to be educated in the particulars of your hiring need? You also want to select a recruiter whose size fits the size of your company and your search. You don't want to be a big search firm's smallest and least important client. Likewise, you don't want to place excessive expectations on a small recruiting firm's service capacity. Management recruiting is a very fragmented field, with lots of small, local players and just a few recognizable brand names among senior management search firms. In my experience, the only reason to select an expensive brand-name recruiting firm is if the search is public news and the selection of a major search partner has public relations value. I started my recruiting career at one of the global retainer search firms, and I learned that there is no reason to believe a bigger, more expensive search firm will provide better service -- or deliver a better outcome. A recruiting firm, of any size, is only as good as the individual recruiter managing your search. Peter Gray is the head of executive recruiting at QTI Professional Staffing in Madison. peterg@qstaff.com madison.com ©2009 Capital Newspapers. All rights reserved. |
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