What Is Executive Search?
What is an Executive Search firm?An executive search firm concentrates on finding and providing candidates for executive and senior management positions for companies across all sectors and also within the public services sector and local and national government. Finding the right person for a key position in your business is critical to your ongoing success and hiring the wrong person can cost you time and money and, in the worst case, lose clients and profit.
An executive search company works by researching and contacting those people across the country who it thinks will fit the criteria you have set out for the job. These could be people that are working in the same sector as you, or who have the appropriate skills to transfer into your company. Many of them will be people who are not currently looking to change jobs, but could be interested by the opportunity you are offering.
If you have previously had difficulty attracting the right calibre of applicant for a senior or executive position, it could be that your current recruitment practices are not reaching the right audience, or that you donň€™t have the time to target your advertising or word-of-mouth communications. Repeatedly recruiting for the same position can be very costly and meanwhile, your business is having to run without a key member of staff, which can be particularly difficult if you manage a rapidly growing company.
Contacting an executive search company to ask for help is easy; even if youň€™ve never done it before. Ask around or search online and make a list of good consultancies who can help you to fulfil your executive appointment needs. At Novo, we have been supplying candidates for executive jobs for many years and we have an established network that allows us to target the people that will be right for your business.
Will Executive Search find you the right candidate?
Many companies handle recruitment in-house, using human resources professionals to manage the recruitment process. This allows the company to keep full control over the appointments and gives them complete traceability over new employees. For executive positions, however, it is sometimes more efficient to outsource your recruitment requirements to an executive search firm.
An executive search firm provides a critical service to busy business leaders. It removes the majority of the administrative burden of recruitment, and also finds appropriate candidates for the post. Instead of spending three or four weeks advertising a position, sifting through tens of CVs, most of which are irrelevant to the job description, contacting possible candidates and arranging several interviews, the companyň€™s management simply need to provide an accurate job description and leave the rest to the executive search consultant.
Once they are happy that they know the clientň€™s exact requirements, an executive search firm can begin to search for individuals who will be able to fulfil the role. This involves a combination of searching their own databases for people already listed with the agency, and using research to track down those people who have the relevant qualifications and experience to fill the position.
These methods allow the executive recruitment company to approach potential candidates that the client company simply could not; either because they donň€™t know of their existence, or because they donň€™t want to be seen as ň€śpoachingň€ť the staff of other companies. By using an executive recruitment consultancy, the company widens its pool of possible candidates and ensures that it is only approaching those who are actually capable of succeeding in the job.
Itň€™s worth bearing in mind that not all sectors are the same - it may be very easy to find six highly qualified accountants to put forward for a senior position, and extremely difficult to find the same number of quantity surveyors or engineers. If you know that your business sector is highly competitive when it comes to good senior managers, then talk to your executive search recruitment consultancy to see how they can help you.
Novo Exec is an executive search firm with experience across many industry sectors and we are ideally placed to help you recruit the right candidate for your senior management vacancies.