Why Hire an Executive Recruiting Firm?

If you’re struggling to place the right executive in your organization, you’ve probably wondered about the merits of hiring an Executive recruiting firm. Is it worth the investment? Shouldn’t my internal HR staff, who knows and understands the needs of my organization, be able to handle the hire? The painful truth that we often remind our clients of is that it takes additional skill and proven experience to attract the top talent.

Of course, you need to aim for the best possible candidates you can get, but it’s equally important that you steer clear of wrong candidates. And while the time-honored method of relying on referrals from acquaintances and colleagues seems to be the instinctive reaction when you’re trying to fill an executive role, the current business climate and the natural rate of executive turnover are both too quick so that you’re going to need assistance if you hope to stay competitive. But, that’s not all. Here are other reasons you should hire an executive recruiting firm.

You Can’t Afford Not To

It’s estimated that the wrong hire can cost your company around 15x that employee’s salary once all is said and done. As we’ve covered in another post, if you hire the wrong person at 100,000, that could wind up costing your company 1.5 million! But that’s not all. The truth is that the cost of hiring the wrong candidate for an executive position can have all sorts of consequences aside from the financial sort, especially when you take into consideration the fact that only half of all CEOs make it past 18 months in a given position.

According to a study from CareerBuilder, the direct and indirect costs of hiring the wrong candidate actually affect your current roster much more than you would have thought:

41% lost worker productivity
40%lost time due to recruiting and training a new hire
36% negative impact on employee morale
22% impact on client solutions

Consider the investment you’ll make to find the right hire, and then consider the cost you’d incur from the wrong hire. This simple cost-benefit analysis of whether or not to hire an executive recruiting firm can yield particularly helpful insights.

We’re not here to fill a position, we’re here to find you the best candidate

When you hire an executive search firm, you pay for us to conduct the search, not to fill the role. Contingency recruiters are those that are paid only once a role has been filled. You might think that that route sounds like a smarter investment, but contingency recruiters are paid to find a hire, not necessarily the best hire, which could wind up hurting you.

Retained, executive search firms charge for their connections, their research, candidate vetting, their handholding and their deep understanding of your personality, company culture and even the indescribable needs of your organization and the role you’re filling.

At Herd Freed Hartz, we work with your organization to find you the best candidate that we can. We are flexible in payments and in our payment milestones, each of which is connected to the satisfaction of our client. We know your satisfaction is our number performance indicator, and nearly 90% of our work comes from repeat or referral business.

Our Time to Candidate Metric is Unbeatable

As we’ve touched on earlier, success in executive recruiting comes down to both finding the right candidate and finding them fast. At Herd Freed Hartz our average time to candidate is 37 days, which means that in that time, we will present you with the candidate that is ultimately hired for the position.

It might seem counterintuitive, but outsourcing recruiting is, in fact, the best way to expedite the process of filling an executive role. Why? Because it’s our only focus. Your HR team has internal tasks to manage, and you’ve other things to focus on, but we’re solely concerned with finding and vetting the best possible candidates. We do this by first working with you to understand the needs of your organization, and then leverage our experience, networks, and connections to put together a pool of candidates that are perfectly tailored for your organization.

Peace of Mind

This is the foremost benefit that the executive search consultants at Herd Freed Hartz provide for our clients. Working for a large organization can be stressful enough and most of those that are looking to hire an executive have separate responsibilities they have to keep up with as well. We work with you, we listen to the story of your business and we do a deep dive into your operations, your team, and the skill needed for a candidate’s success int he given the role. We also identify key goals and outcomes. Through all of this, we’ve developed a time-tested approach for targeting the ideal candidate for some of the Northwest’s largest organizations – from Zillow to Starbucks to REI to Les Schwab Tires.

An executive search partner focuses solely on offering the most value for the business during the search, reducing stress on both parties, so that by the time the first highly-qualified candidate is considered, the client and candidate are prepared equally to understand the probability of landing a successful offer.

A keyword search is no way to judge if a candidate is a good cultural fit for your organization. At Herd Freed Hartz, we go beyond the resume to find the right candidate for your organization by taking the appropriate responsibility to accurately represent your brand in the market place. We provide job descriptions that truly sizzle, helping you stand out from the competition.

So why do you need an executive search firm?

Interested in having HERD FREED HARTZ help with your executive recruiting? Get in touch today!

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5 Ways Ineffective Recruiting is Hurting Your Business

You rely on your employees to keep your business running and your customers satisfied, which makes finding the right candidates critical to your success. But let us remind you, in the U.S., managers have an average hiring success rate of only 50%. That’s far too many missed opportunities, and too many unfortunate consequences as a result. Aside from being a headache and a time drain, hiring the wrong candidate can cost a business an incredible amount of money, increase employee turnover, diminish morale, productivity and product quality, just to name a few. Here are five of the typical consequences that come with bringing on the wrong hire, and five things you’ll want to avoid to keep your organization’s on track.

1. Hurting Your Bottom Line

Even the right candidate is expensive: the upfront costs of interviewing, travel and hotels, training, testing. The wrong candidate multiplies those costs and carries additional hidden costs of diminished productivity. The Center for American Progress reports that a bad hire can cost as $6,000-$15,000, or 20% of an average employee’s salary. However, in their best-selling business book Who, authors Geoff Smart and Randy Street, calculate the cost of a wrong candidate to be as high as 15x that employee’s salary. That means an employee salaried at $100,000 could cost a business $1.5 million in both hard costs and productivity loss.

2. Lowers Employee Morale

In a recent survey from Robert Half of more than 1,000 small and midsize businesses, 53% of respondents reported that teams that work with bad hires experience increased stress. In the same survey, 20% of respondents said mistakes in hiring led to decreased confidence in management. Those results spell disrupted workflow, diminished productivity and increased customer dissatisfaction.

In a larger, wide-reaching organization employee morale is everything. If you’re empowering individuals to make important decisions on their own, then you’ve got to make sure they’re happy with their role and responsibilities, and often times that sense of happiness depends on stability provided by management. When management competence is questioned, which often happens as a result of bad hire, employee morale suffers.

3. Creates More Work for Team Members

Terminating a bad hire isn’t the end of that mistake. Between termination and finding a suitable candidate to fill the vacancy, other team members typically have to pick up the slack. That can take a serious toll in Portland or Seattle where, according to Glassdoor, the average time it takes to interview is 25.3 days or 25.0 days respectively. Not to mention the demands that interviewing, training and monitoring new hires puts on management and human resource departments.

At Herd Freed hartz, our time to candidate metric is typically around 37 days, which means that in that time we will present you with the candidate that is ultimately hired. That may seem like a long time, especially when you have a role to fill, but trust us, it’s better to hire slowly (combing through candidates to find the right people) and fire quickly (when it doesn’t work out) than it is to do the opposite.

4. Increase Employee Turnover

For all the reasons above, choosing the wrong candidate creates an environment that can lead team members to seek out new jobs, multiplying the problem you’re trying to resolve. People can only pick up the slack of a vacant position for so long. And the damage of poor leadership or management level hires is even greater. Rather than simply decreasing a team’s productivity and lowering morale, bad leadership leads to mismanagement of whole teams or departments that can ripple throughout a business. One Gallup report found that half of all employees have left a company to get away from disagreeable management at some point in their career.

The more responsibility for a role that you’re trying to fill, the greater the fallout from a bad hire is likely to be. That’s why, when attempting to fill an executive position, it’s best to work with executive search consultants that have experience sourcing and placing the very best executive talent available.

5. Wastes Your Time

The extra hours you put in should be to grow your business, pursue new ideas, and develop with your team. When managed in-house, it can take far too long to find and hire the right candidate, meanwhile typical responsibilities and workflow suffer as a result. There’s no need to bog down management and human resources with a problem that companies like Herd Freed Hartz strive to resolve so that your time stays your own.

Your business is what you do. At Herd Freed Hartz, saving your business time and money by finding the best leadership with the highest ROI is what we do. We understand that executive recruiting is as much art as science. At Herd Freed Hartz, we look beyond résumés and keyword-matches. We understand personality and the importance of culture fit. Our executive search consultants will work with you, listen to your story, utilize a business-wide approach, dynamic interviewing, and epic storytelling techniques to deliver peace of mind in the form of top-level executive talent.

If you’re interested in the ways that Herd Freed Hartz’ Executive Search Consultants can help you, connect with us today.

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Hook job candidates with your “company sizzle”

Does this work? While it may not deter candidates who are actively seeking new positions, you aren’t going to see much traction with sought-after talent through this approach. Instead, your company must tell a compelling story to reel in desirable candidates.

As recruiters and hiring managers, we’ve all heard the term “employee value proposition,” or EVP, tossed around inside corporate cultures. A new term that is starting to gain traction, particularly as the hiring market remains heated, is “candidate value proposition.” The difference is subtle, but speaks to the need to understand and market to your target audience — in this case, potential employees — by having a well-thought-out answer to the question, “Why should I work for your company?”

Like a marketing organization, the best way to hook your audience is to understand what it is they want to know, rather than telling them what you think they should know. Place yourself in the shoes of the customer — or, in this case, the candidate — to develop a personalized, relevant introduction to your company that will engage their interest by asking yourself the following questions.

Every company is compelling in some way; the key is to understand and articulate what differentiates your company’s products and culture. Did your company make a “best place to work” list? Is it active in the community or focused on environmentally friendly solutions? Does your company boast a long average tenure? Is your product the first of its kind, or on the cutting edge of the latest evolution in a mature or crowded space? Leverage public opinion of your company, but in a concise and meaningful way. Identify ways in which your company deliberately fights the status quo.

What unique challenges does my company face?

Companies tend to pitch themselves in a glossy, Photoshopped light, but your toughest problems can actually be an attraction to potential talent. Everyone wants their work to be recognized and meaningful; show potential employees how they can step up and be a hero.

Most job descriptions provide a laundry list of responsibilities that don’t vary much from one description to the next. Instead of focusing on the tactical work, focus on the results the successful candidate will achieve in the role, and how those results will directly impact the big picture.

Keep in mind not everyone will be the right fit for your company, and that’s OK. Don’t be afraid to use language that will deter candidates who wouldn’t likely be successful in your environment. Not only will this save you time on the back end by filtering out candidates who aren’t a fit, but it can actually make the right candidate even more attracted to the position.

It takes time to hone your company story, and it’s important to stay consistent with overall company messaging. However, don’t fall into the trap of being too uniform in your candidate approach; tell a story that will grab the heart as well as the intellect of top talent.

Karen Bertiger advises companies throughout the Puget Sound area as a managing director of the Seattle-based firm Herd Freed Hartz Inc.

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