Staffing Success

Executive search and placement firms assist clients with locating difficult-to-find, highly-qualified candidates. 

By George N. Saliba, Managing Editor On Sep 1, 2014

While the unemployment rate remains relatively high, experts say many workers who have been downsized aren’t necessarily top-tier talent, in part because they were selected for layoffs in the first place. Meanwhile, businesses largely remain in a high-pitched cost-cutting mode, and when they must hire, they are extremely selective about whom they bring into their firms. Tony Glennon, managing partner at GSP International, says, “Companies think there are probably a dozen or more qualified candidates, when there may only be two or three candidates within a specific geographic area and industry. Odds are, these people are probably gainfully employed and will have to be incented, within reason, [to leave.]”

Given the above dynamics, placement firms can play a critical role in locating highly-skilled, employed candidates who aren’t actively seeking work, and, moreover, might work for companies’ competitors. Glennon adds, “Quite frankly, companies are very often looking for somebody from a competitor. And they are not in a position, either morally or ethically, to recruit directly from Company A, if they are Company B, in the same industry. They use us as a tool to identify the talent.”

In this way, quality executive search and placement firms can appropriately glean employees from an array of businesses, and, separately, meaningfully sift through a morass of resumes, as well as handle much of the laborious grunt work associated with screening/interviewing candidates. It’s a win-win situation for companies that need superb workers with the correct technical skill sets, professional demeanors, and who will merge well with their unique corporate cultures. The cost of using a placement firm may be much lower than the price of a “wrong hire” employee whose charm fades, and whose work ethic and/or technical skills may eventually be revealed as deficient.

As Ray Pirre – another managing partner at GSP International – explains, “There’s an axiom in our business that some of the best resumes have the worst people attached to them. And some of the worst resumes have the best people attached to them.” Discerning the difference requires years of experience, as does understanding that a highly intellectual, “polished” interviewee may merely have superficial communication skills.

By the same token, while companies are acutely concerned about hiring a “wrong candidate,” a broad fault is that they can sometimes be overly selective. Pirre explains, “Companies will sit down and put a 15-factor ‘wish list’ together. And if a candidate does not have 15 of those 15 factors, companies are not motivated to hire. Because companies are so cautious about bringing on new salaries, and paying benefits and making investments, they don’t want to hire the wrong person. Therefore, they set these very high standards. And they often miss very highly-accomplished, high quality, appropriate people, just because those people don’t have one of those 15 items. I think companies are short-sighted; they miss out on the candidate who, five years ago, in a more robust economy, the company would have said: ‘You know what? This candidate only has 12 of the 15 factors, but we will train them. They could easily assimilate to our company. They are the type of person who would succeed here.’”

Again, striking the right balance can be facilitated by an outside firm, which not only has access to non-Monster.com employees, but is detached from companies’ internal “office politics,” “power plays,” and bureaucratic arguments over whom to hire.

In this vein, Larry Dolinko, president of professional services at The Execu Search Group, adds, “When clients contact the agency, the one thing that would be really helpful is that they have full approval to go out and hire a person. Sometimes we come upon a situation in which we speak to a client, they tell us what they are looking for, we produce a couple of very qualified candidates, and they find out they don’t have a budget for it. Or, they find out that the job was put on hold. I know that doesn’t happen 100 percent of the time, but companies need to have the ability and the authorization to go out and actually be able to hire someone. One of the questions I like my salespeople to ask is: ‘If we present you with a qualified candidate, are you ready to move forward with this individual?’ We try to cover ourselves, and make sure that they do have the approval to move forward, if we were to put someone in front of them who they really like.”

And how, precisely, do executive search and placement firms locate nonpareil talent? They often have been in business for decades, and are already familiar with thousands of candidates whom they have weaved into various companies, over many years. The placement firms know the pros and cons of these difficult-to-locate employees, and can tap internal databases to find them. Dolinko adds, “This has been 25-plus years in the making at our firm. A lot of what we really hang our hats on is referral-based business: People we have placed in the past that are referring their friends. Clients that we worked with in the past, that are referring some of their colleagues, or some people that they might know in other companies, in similar positions. We have really had a lot of success with referral-based business.”

GSP International’s Glennon says, “We just received an offer at the vice-president-of-tax level. This is a gentleman I have known and worked with, both as a hiring manager, as well as a candidate, over the past 15-plus years. And because it is at the VP level – his level of experience, and the time that I’ve known him – really contributed to the success of completing this search. We had a head start, because a firm such as ours, which has been in business for 25 years, enabled us to tap an inventory of candidates who have already been referenced and vetted. We were in a position to respond rather quickly on this search assignment. Monster.com and LinkedIn – they are tools – no doubt, but they probably represent maybe 20 percent of the search process. It really is the network of an established firm that allows us to tap into what we will call the ‘hidden candidate market.’”

Yet, if an unknown candidate is involved, placement firms are deeply familiar with the ins-and-outs of employment and social media sites. Anthony Curlo, president and CEO of DaVinciTek (which specializes in IT professionals), says, “Organizations don’t use social media – social recruiting – to its advantage, often enough. Companies also don’t invest in an ATS (Applicant Tracking System). We deal with numerous, large organizations. They don’t have an adequate database of their own records.”

That said, Dolinko, of The Execu Search Group, adds, “Meeting with candidates, in person, just has so much value. There’s a relationship to be built which you cannot gain via a phone call, or even a Skype interview. Meeting in person builds a relationship, it builds a level of trust, a level of compatibility. For us, again, we put such an emphasis on it that I don’t see that changing, and I see it being a way to minimize positions or people not working out in certain roles.”

Doris Banach-Osenni, president of The Brentwood Group, also explains, “The professionals who are sought are getting other calls from many search firms. So, a has to be one of the most sophisticated and best communicators in the market, for those individuals to even chat with [it], and to get engaged with looking at a search. It’s not transactional, and professionals have to be handled with kid gloves. It has to be very confidential and sensitive. Everything must be high quality.”

Overall, companies may contact placement firms for very specialized positions in their companies, since small- to medium-sized organizations don’t always have recruiting talent within their companies. These companies need a skilled agency to locate the specialized talent that drives their business. Banach-Osenni says, “That is something that is important, and some [placement] firms have unbundled their services like we have, for small- and medium-sized companies. A few of our clients utilize The Brentwood Group because we have unbundled our services in an affordable, hourly way for them, to let us act as a true extension of their company, do the recruiting for them, understand their culture, what’s going to work for their culture, and what’s going to work for the people whom they are seeking. In that regard, large companies often come to us, as well. Their human resources teams sometimes handle the final interviewing and reference checking. But, they need a firm like ours, because they may be launching new sales products. For example, we have a pharmaceutical company that needs 27 reps over three regions, within two months. And their department just cannot handle that kind of volume. It is very cost-effective for them to come to outside firms and say, ‘You know, for our product launch we have a deadline.’”

Employees are one of companies’ most critical assets, and ensuring they are highly-trained and professional is key to facilitating firms’ productivity, interactions with vendors and clients, research and development – and, ultimately, profits. New Jersey-based executive search and placement firms stand ready to assist, especially in an increasingly labyrinth-like labor market.