Recruiting Strategies for Executive Search

Typical in-house recruiting strategies are time and budget intensive, especially if a company is seeking high-end executive, technical, or managerial talent. Executive recruitment by your own HR team frequently involves dedicating one or more staff members' time, and availability of this staff may vary depending on the season, ongoing projects, and their commitments to other departments. It’s all too easy to find yourselves finally giving time to placing ads for a job or a role long after a need has been identified and unfilled. This can result in a disjointed, frantic, poorly-thought-out process of attempting to connect with qualified candidates.

Job Boards and Their Implications

If a company places ads on job boards, competitors can see them, and such ads may also attract unwanted attention from other various avenues, like industry publications. A very fortunate company will draw resumés from a range of applicants. But these must usually be tracked over a period of weeks or months, pored over by multiple parties, and vetted for accuracy. Searches that were initially envisioned as elementary or streamlined can become extended, difficult, and fraught with bureaucratic hurdles. Applicants who were open and eager at the beginning of the process may become unavailable or disinterested later on, especially if the search drags on. 

Ads alone not enough to woo the best talent. Occasionally, a company may determine that it’s necessary to attend industry conferences and trade shows to get access to leading candidates; in these cases the recruitment process becomes personal. This can incur additional costs in the form of travel expenses, corporate functions, private dinners, sponsored junkets, attendance and exhibitor costs, etc. Communications with applicants can be complicated by interdepartmental politics, differing goals, and personal agendas.

For these reasons and many others, our clients have discovered that the best recruiting strategies to employ an "arm's length" approach by using a third party to conduct the process.

The PROs and CONs of Hiring Outsiders

Going with a freelance recruiter who specializes in a particular industry or locale to find them someone specific for a role can be disappointing. It’s entirely possible that you’ll find the meager collections of talent these people draw from is limited to handfuls of previous contacts. Or they may find that these people's areas of expertise and personal connections are not broad enough to handle a wide range of new positions.

A full-service agency that specializes in executive search, with veteran experience and and a vast pool of qualified candidates to tap, is much better positioned to fill all of a company's executive openings. There are so many advantages to using an experienced partner for your search, we can’t name them all here, but there is one more worth mentioning.

What's Better than Traditional Search and Cheaper than Search Agencies?

Most agencies usually charge based on a  retainer, or they may charge a contingency fee for each candidate successfully placed. We don’t. At Anderson Sterling Associates, we take the approach that there should never be a contingency fee associated with finding a qualified candidate for your search. Our unique approach results in large cost savings, particularly for firms that have regular executive staffing needs. We believe in saving you time finding the best people for the job at every turn. For each search, Anderson Sterling Associates provides a written proposal detailing the timeline of the search process, performance guarantees, and total cost. Your budget will be adhered to, and your time freed up.

Let ASA be the secret weapon of your recruiting strategies. You'll be glad you did!