The Hidden Costs of Not Hiring an Executive Recruiter

The hiring process is a daunting undertaking when it comes to filling any position within a company, but filling executive level positions compounds this stress tenfold. This is because finding candidates for high-level vacancies at your company ought to be treated with a special urgency. Executives at an organization must reflect the culture and the purpose of the business in a way that lower level positions do not call for. So when you treat your executive search the same way you treat finding candidates for non-executive positions within your company, you risk costing your company an immeasurable amount of resources.

It is imperative to make the executive hiring process both as informative and as concise as possible, but this is a tall order for most leaders who also must concern themselves with running the day to day business of running their company.

Executive Recruiters

This is where an executive recruiter comes in. If you’re not using the services of a professional and established executive recruitment company, you could be costing yourself and your company more than just time. So how do you know when it is time to hire the services of a professional recruitment firm? “Maybe you have just opened your organization, and you want to hire highly-qualified candidates,” says Tom Chaparro, Executive Vice President of the Newport Group, an executive recruiter in San Diego. “You may not have access to the candidate that is ideal if you don’t have the time, relationships or knowledge in the field.” If this sounds like a problem your organization might be facing in their executive search, you could be risking any of the following by not investing in an executive recruitment firm from the get go.

Time Wasted

As cliché as it is, time is money. Businesses—and new businesses especially—need to work as efficiently as possible when it comes to their time. There are a ton of hidden tasks involved in finding and then vetting potential candidates before you even consider them seriously for vacancies, and all of this time adds up.

When it comes to filling executive positions, these aren’t menial tasks that can just be handed off easily to an assistant. But first time leaders may be no better prepared to tackle the process and may unwittingly waste time by not knowing what to look out for in potential candidates. Executive recruitment firms often perform many services beyond just finding potential candidates. Over time, these extra steps add up, so hiring these agencies may save you time you did not even know you’d have been wasting.

Smaller Candidate Pool

Advertising executive positions via the usual avenues will likely only attract the same pool of candidates you would have reached had you been looking to fill a lower level vacancy. With higher level positions, companies cannot afford to experiment with candidates via trial and error. Reputable executive recruiters have networks of prospects and qualified applicants that they have carefully cultivated through years of hard work. Executive search agencies can afford to dedicate all of their time to finding the right fit for your company, because it is their entirety of their business to do so. Can you or the leadership of your company afford to dedicate all of their time to cultivating and then also culling a large field of candidates?

Too Much Subjectivity

You and your organization’s leadership likely have a lot of ideas concerning the type of person they feel will best fit the role you’re looking to fill. This is great and a vital part of the hiring process. The trouble arises when you have limited resources to expend and are looking for any way to cut corners. It becomes tempting to shape your viable candidate pool around your presuppositions of what a good candidate would look like. This is natural, but this implicit bias can seriously limit your available options when you’re looking to move forward in the hiring process. This is where the objective lens of an outside executive recruitment firm comes in handy.

An executive recruiter will often make it a point to immerse themselves in your organization’s culture. This way, they can get a good grasp of what sort of candidate will—and won’t–be a good fit for your high-level vacancy. But even with this intimate understanding of your organization, they can impart a new perspective you may never have considered.

Filling a high-level executive position at your company can be an overwhelming task. It is uniquely difficult in ways that filling lower vacancies aren’t. For some companies, hiring the services of a professional executive recruitment firm may be the right choice to meet these difficulties in the most cost effective and efficient manner.