Michael • Thomas Executive Search

When To Hire A Recruiter

When to hire a recruiting firm?

People are your greatest asset. They’re your brand ambassadors and the lifeline to help build your business. According to a recent study by Paycor, labor costs can account for up to 70% of total business costs, which means they’re also your biggest investment, both in terms of finances and time.

It’s true that headhunters, recruiters and staffing agencies can come at a premium cost difficult to digest for a small or medium size business. That cost is the reason many businesses shy away from seeking help outside of the organization. But remember what I said in the first paragraph, that people are your biggest investment? That’s the main reason why you should consider spending the extra money. Wondering when is the right time to make that decision? Let’s dive in to why and when the cost to work with a headhunter or professional recruiting firm makes sense.

Why you should partner with a headhunter or recruiting firm.

A headhunter’s job is to be your partner through the entire process and to have your best interest in mind. They share your goal to fill the position quickly, and with the most qualified candidate. A headhunter doesn’t want to re-fill the position down the road and most (good) headhunters pride themselves on never having to do so.

Headhunters can source passive candidates in addition to active job seekers. This is an important one! It’s common for companies to post a job, then wait for candidate resumes to trickle in. However, a good headhunter will understand your business, your company culture and the nonverbal idiosyncrasies that make your organization tick. Powered with that information, the headhunter can proactively work through their internal candidate database and call on prospects employed at other companies who may not be actively looking, but who may be a great fit for your company. Their proactive vs. reactive approach can make all the difference.

Consulting Is More Than Giving Advice

By Arthur N. Turner for Harvard Business Review

Each year management consultants in the United States receive more than $2 billion for their services. Much of this money pays for impractical data and poorly implemented recommendations. To reduce this waste, clients need a better understanding of what consulting assignments can accomplish. They need to ask more from such advisers, who in turn must learn to satisfy expanded expectations.

This article grows out of current research on effective consulting, including interviews with partners and officers of five well-known firms. It also stems from my experience supervising beginning consultants and from the many conversations and associations I’ve had with consultants and clients in the United States and abroad. These experiences lead me to propose a means of clarifying the purposes of management consulting. When clarity about purpose exists, both parties are more likely to handle the engagement process satisfactorily.

A Hierarchy of Purposes

Management consulting includes a broad range of activities, and the many firms and their members often define these practices quite differently. One way to categorize the activities is in terms of the professional’s area of expertise (such as competitive analysis, corporate strategy, operations management, or human resources). But in practice, as many differences exist within these categories as between them.

Another approach is to view the process as a sequence of phases–entry, contracting, diagnosis, data collection, feedback, implementation, and so on. However, these phases are usually less discrete than most consultants admit.

“It’s, Like, Lawless”: How Private-Equity Headhunters Are Bleeding Wall Street

By William D. Cohan for Vanity Fair

In the battle for young talent, investment banks have been reduced to prep schools for private equity. Inside the cutthroat recruiting process launching the next generation of the superrich—and what it reveals about the status realignment rocking Wall Street.

Once upon a time on Wall Street, the best and the brightest wanted to be M&A bankers, like Felix Rohatyn or Bruce Wasserstein. They wanted to advise IBM on its acquisition of Lotus, or GE on its purchase of RCA. If you could do that work at Goldman Sachs, at Morgan Stanley, or at Lazard (where I once worked), then there was nothing better in terms of pay, prestige, and bragging rights. You were, definitionally, a Master of the Universe.

Well, those days are over. And it’s not only because, according to the Financial Times, M&A deal volume for the first nine months of 2019 is down to its slowest pace in more than two years. Rather, for recent college graduates interested in finance, the place to be these days—assuming you are not an entrepreneur or tech-oriented—is private equity, firms that buy and sell other companies using mostly other peoples’ billions. That’s where real money can be made. In this new, increasingly unregulated America, where the disparity between rich and poor is reaching epidemic proportions, where Donald Trump could hypothetically shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, people like Stephen Schwarzman, the cofounder of the Blackstone Group (net worth nearly $17 billion and counting); Leon Black, the cofounder of Apollo Global Management (net worth roughly $7.5 billion); and Henry Kravis, cofounder of KKR (net worth $6 billion) are the superstars and the ones to emulate. Investment bankers, worth mere millions, are pikers by comparison.

One consequence of private equity’s current preeminence is that, in the battle for talent, it’s no longer a contest. There’s a massive status realignment: The big private-equity firms essentially treat Wall Street’s major banks like a farm system, plucking away the most desirable young talent after they’ve had a couple years of seasoning. Nowadays, the recruiting of analysts, as entry-level bankers are called, is starting literally within weeks of recent college grads beginning their new Wall Street jobs—in other words, before they know a damn thing. “It’s wild,” says one former Wall Street analyst who now works in private equity. “It’s absolutely ridiculous.” Essentially, as soon as the recent college grads get to the Wall Street investment banks, they are getting recruited to leave to go to private-equity firms. “It’s, like, lawless,” he continues. “It makes no sense.”

The Type of Talent Recruiters Should Be Fighting For

There are certain attributes exceptional candidates have in common, and it’s up to the recruiters to recognize them and fight for them. Not all candidates possess all of these talents, nor do they need them all, but if there are candidates that naturally encompass a few of them, they are bound to become a rising star at whichever company fights the hardest for them. In no particular order, here they are:

Data Cruncher
With big data being at the forefront of a company’s growth, candidates should be able to crunch numbers, analyze data and explain what those numbers mean. This skill proves intuition, analytical abilities and top-notch problem solving skills. You’re not looking for a robot, rather someone who knows what numbers mean, not just what their numerical value is worth.

Communication
All employees, from every company, represent their employer. The best employees communicate intelligently on a social, public and interpersonal level. Whether this candidate is giving a presentation to hundreds, or having a one on one meeting, they communicate sincerely, accurately and professionally. Businesses can’t function without great communication, and it all starts with their employees.

Influencer
This trait comes in many forms. The ability to influence the growth of a business, the ability to influence a group at a meeting, or even the ability to influence the business your company is in. If a candidate can influence, they have the ability to lead. And, if you’re candidate can’t lead, they can’t grow.

Decision Maker
Being able to make a decision, and follow through on that decision, is one of the most admirable traits a candidate can possess. So many others are coy when it comes to decisions because they don’t want to be held responsible if something went awry. Great leaders make decisions, and if they’re the wrong ones, they are the first to understand why and they’re the first to work towards a solution.

Original Article found HERE.

Making Sure The Shoe Fits

The search for talent has become an increasingly complex challenge as companies scour the globe for the right executive to lead a firm or business unit.

Not only are their needs getting more specialized, but the field of candidates is widening as the economy goes global. Jean Guilbault, co-founder of the Montreal-based executive search firm GXB Leadership, says companies need to change how they view the search process.

The old way of doing things was to “find the right person from your network of contacts,” he said in a recent interview. “Now what we’re looking for is a business solution.” Instead of trying to find the right individual, it’s all about asking the right questions, he says. Companies need to identify what challenges they face — whether it’s growing the business through acquisitions, restructuring, downsizing or productivity — before looking for a person who can contribute to those goals.

Read the full article here.

Written By: Peter Hadekel, Special To Montreal Gazette
Montreal Gazette

Mobile Job Recruiting

The job recruiting arena has changed tenfold from where it was a few years ago. No longer is “casting the widest net” an intuitive, or effective approach. Finding the specific candidate takes a specific approach. The Internet is by far the most effective tool for finding those perfect candidates, but how you use the Internet is where the effectiveness lies. As mobile phones and tablets surpass desktop use, executive search firms need to adapt their online advertising, marketing and overall presence to become mobile friendly, properly search engine optimized and much more.

Jay Barnett, from Recruiting Trends explains 6 tactics to improve your mobile recruiting efforts:

1. Make sure your careers portal, if not your entire website, uses responsive design. This gives web pages the fluidity to scale and reorganize to fit any kind of screen, while still looking sharp.

2. Make it easy for candidates to upload résumés from a mobile device. At DT we allow people to upload directly from LinkedIn, Monster.com, Indeed, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box or OneDrive. Note that this also ties mobile in with your social media strategy. Alternatively, candidates can copy and paste, or provide a URL to an online version of their résumé.

3. If you use questionnaires, provide radio buttons rather than pull-down lists. Not only is this easier for mobile users, but it also readily displays all the available choices.

4. To keep up with emerging best practices, do what you probably are doing already: monitor blogs and white papers from leaders in the digital recruitment space. There are webinars available as well. And here’s a unique idea: get feedback from candidates who are mobile users.

5. To ensure online images translate well to a small screen, use CSS (cascading style sheets — your IT team will know) to fit images to scale. You want to be sure images aren’t set to a fixed screen size or allowed to default to their “native” size.

6. Videos are relatively easy, thanks to services like YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, and others. They provide “embed codes” that handle scaling for multiple devices.

Above all else, make sure your website and online initiatives are built with responsive design. So weather someone is looking at your site on their iPone, iPad, desktop or laptop, everything appears flawless and navigation is simple and easy to use. Take a look through our website on multiple devices, it’s a 100% responsively designed website.

Read Jay Barnett’s full article here.

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