The
reason so many companies choose to use a "headhunter" to fill their
critical openings include:
Confidentiality - A recruiter is able to scour the
market without alerting everyone, except those that need to know
that a search is in progress.
Professional Expertise - A professional recruiter is
constantly in touch with the employment market in his/her specialty.
Nobody is in a better position to identify the doorways and back
rooms where the best candidates can be found.
Finding Passive Recruits - The professional recruiter
is aware that the best people are not looking for a new job. They
have no reason or need to post resumes or read want ads in the
newspaper or on the web. The recruiter, however, is effective in
bringing many of these people to the table by professionally
presenting the career enhancing aspects that their client has to
offer.
Cost
Effectiveness - The recruiters fee often looks high but not when
compared to the real cost of recruiting on your own or with in-house
recruiters. Consider that if you do-it-yourself you need to add in
the salaries and benefits of the recruiting staff, and the salary
and benefits of the line managers involved in the process along with
the cost of lost revenue while they are not doing their primary
jobs. Additionally you need to figure in travel and entertainment
costs for in-house recruiters. If you use researchers there are the
source development costs. Other overhead includes telephone, office
space, postage, literature, database management of recruit database,
website costs, reference checking, clerical cost for responding to
hundreds of unqualified candidates and advertising costs.
Getting Unbiased Third Party Input - The professional
recruiter develops a long list of prospective candidates and
unbiasedly culls them to a short list with the clients specific
needs always in view.
Speed - Because the recruiter knows where to look, the
time involved in identifying and recruiting highly qualified
candidates and arranging a meeting with the client is
minimized.
Less
Downtime After the Hire - Because a recruited person often
already has the specific skills the client needs, he/she is
generally ready to go with only minor orientation.
Reality - The professional recruiter is in the unique
position of being able to assess the clients job description and
determine, with the client, the reality of the fit of desired
skills, salary, prerequisites, etc. as compared to what the
competitive marketplace is looking for.
Negotiation - The recruiter is a middleman who can
facilitate negotiations and make sure misunderstandings don’t become
deal breakers.
Prioritizing - The fee for one well placed individual
is more important to the bottom line of an organization than many of
the perks given to high ranking executives.
The
negatives for using a search firm are limited. The biggest one is
that a search firm cannot recruit out of any client for a period of
one to two years. If the selected firm has worked with several of
your competitors in that period of time, you will not see any
candidates from those firms. This can impact your ability to see all
the best candidates.
Contact Howard Bloom for more information.
