The executive search industry has witnessed a dramatic shift in how board and senior-level executives are recruited.  Co-Founder and General Partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz Marc Andreessen believes LinkedIn is “eating” the recruiting industry. Yes, that’s the actual verb he uses in an essay he wrote for The Wall Street Journal “Why Software is Eating the World” and yes, as an investor in LinkedIn, Mr. Andreessen has a vested interest in promoting the idea. But he has a point.

Software is changing how we do what we do in fundamental ways. But with every cool new advance in technology, there’s a catch. (Isn’t there always?)

There is now a treasure trove of data available on candidates.  However, in most cases, it is not current, it is incomplete, and increasingly it is not structured.  Moreover, there is so much information available, recruiters are suffering from information overload. Increasingly, they’re missing top talent, not because the candidates are hard to find, but because they cannot see the forest for the trees. Recruiting “best practices” were never designed to deal with Big Data.  It represents both a threat and an opportunity that I detail in our latest video.

We welcome your thought and comments on the trends you’ve witnessed.

Krista Bradford (39 Posts)

Krista Bradford is CEO of next-gen retained search firm The Good Search and of its research division Intellerati. In a former career, Ms. Bradford served as an award-winning television journalist and investigative reporter. Now she pursues truth, justice, and great talent in the executive suite . . .

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Every year, we at Intellarati meet with more than 100 buyers of executive search as does our retained search practice The Good Search. Since we advocate for better executive search practices and make our feelings known (on this blog and elsewhere), we frequently get asked about the other search firms or competitors in the NYC region. Naturally, people want to know what are the best search firms in the New York City Area.

In the interest of objectivity and putting a little good karma out there, below is the listing of some of the other New York City Area executive search firms that conduct senior executive search in the tri-state region of New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey.  While everyone has their favorites, these firms have solid histories of providing retained executive search in and around Manhattan.

Question for the reader:
What qualities do you seek in the executive search firms that you use? What qualities distinguish those that you consider to be among the best? We welcome your thoughts and comments . . .

Related articles

• Executive Search Prices: How Much Is My Executive Search Really Going to Cost?
• How to Conduct Executive Search In-House: Differently

Krista Bradford (39 Posts)

Krista Bradford is CEO of next-gen retained search firm The Good Search and of its research division Intellerati. In a former career, Ms. Bradford served as an award-winning television journalist and investigative reporter. Now she pursues truth, justice, and great talent in the executive suite . . .

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Cost is one of the top questions that executive search buyers have when they have an important opening to fill. The problem with answering the question is that there are so many kinds of search firms and recruiting services available that executive search prices vary wildly.

However, I can give you a sense of what companies typically spend on an executive search by sharing common price ranges of various executive search services.

Going Out to Search Or Ordering In?

The first question a company needs to answer is whether it wants to hand off the executive search to a search firm or whether it wants to manage the engagement in-house. There are companies that offer flexible unbundled search and recruiting research services, a trend that has grown in popularity in recent years. Employers seeking full-service executive search services usually turn to a search firm.

For companies that want to go “out to search” there are two traditional search firm models: retained search firms and contingency firms.

1. Retained:  Retained executive search firms are paid a retainer to do the work of executive search. The fee is not contingent upon making an actual placement. Retained firms tend to concentrate on recruiting senior executives who are passive candidates — those who are not actively looking for the next job.
2. Contingency: Contingency search firms are only paid when they make a placement. They tend to concentrate on recruiting candidates that are actively looking for their next jobs. While there is some cross over — mainly at the VP and Director levels — retained firms focus on executive searches, and contingency firms focus on non-executive search.

Executive Search Pricing: Search Firms

The pricing model of traditional search firms typically does not give clients an opportunity to save. Employers pay a full fee regardless as to whether the search takes a week, a month, or half a year. That’s because the pricing is not based on effort or time spent looking or the difficulty of a particular engagement. Rather, it is based on a percentage of annual compensation.

Percentage-Based Pricing

With percentage fees, the more a candidate is paid, the more a search firm makes. Some contend that is a conflict of interest. Percentage-based pricing provides financial incentive for search firms to negotiate higher salaries of the candidates they place, which is not in the best interest of the client.

• Retained search: 30-33% of total first year cash compensation of the candidate placed, plus expenses
• Contingency Search: 20-25% of first year base salary of the candidate placed

Flat Fee Pricing

A small percentage of search firms charge a flat fee, including Egon Zehnder, one of the leading retained firms in the world. (Full disclosure: Intellerati is the research division of The Good Search, which also offers retained services by flat fee.) Egon Zehnder maintains the pricing model enables the firm to be “completely unbiased” and to “facilitate hiring negotiations with no conflict of interest. Most fixed fees are similar in total amount to the percentage based fees.

While there will always be firms that charge less, and there were always be search engagements that enable a firm to charge more, most executive search fees fall within a basic range, regardless as to how the firm does the math.

Average Full-Service Executive Search Fee

• $50,000 – $300,000

Executive Search Pricing:In-House Services

At large corporations, the do-it-yourself executive search model has grown in popularity.  Employers using internal executive recruiters and corporate executive search teams to conduct executive search in-house. In doing so, they frequently turn to executive search research firms and vendors offering unbundled executive search services to augment their own efforts. Sometimes, all they want is a list of potential candidates for their own executive recruiters to call. Sometimes, they want interested, qualified candidates that they’ll usher through the interview process through to hire. Sometimes, they want a firm that flexes to serve as an extension of their own team.

Executive Search Research and Unbundled Services

Executive Search Research firms and search firms offering unbundled services typically charge by the hour, by the project/search, or by monthly retainer.  Research firms offering name generation services also charge by-the-name. Name-gen research produces lists of target candidate names. Typically, the lists are comprised of information gathered from the Internet and from calling into companies.

The wide range in pricing depends on the services offerred and on domain expertise, access to top talent, consultative abilities, and executive presence of the firm. The budget firms may produce candidates who are simply “willing to take a call”, without qualifying, interviewing and vetting the candidate with a more thorough assessment. They typically do not position offers, assist in negotiations, and close the candidate.

Average By-the-Name Prices:

• $30 to $50 a name

Average By-the-Hour Prices:

• $90 to $150 an hour

Average By-The-Month Prices

• $20,000 – $40,000

Increasingly, in-house recruiting teams are turning firms that offer the expertise of retained search firms services, but a much more flexible model. designed for in-house search teams.  Frequently, theses firms work by monthly retainer as a natural extension the in-house executive recruiting team.  Unlike the retained model, the monthly retainer gives companies a significant opportunity to save.

In most cases, firms offering unbundled services are not responsible for the hire. Research firms do make it a practice to guarantee the quality of their research.

Risks to Consider

By-the-Name Risks

The risk of By-the-Name pricing is paying for names you don’t need. Another weakness is it is a quantitative approach. A name doesn’t tell your who is good. Moreover, a name does not a candidate make. Someone still needs to do the work of recruiting, converting the name into a viable candidate.

By-the-Hour Risks

The risk of By-the-Hour pricing is that it gives the illusion of comparing apples-to-apples when that is rarely the case. A company with a lower hourly rate may be a terrific bargain or it might cost you more per engagement — either in the total fee for the engagement or in a botched search or missed opportunity. Another risk of By-The-Hour pricing is that the meter is always running. The risk can be mitigated if it is possible to set a flat project fee, so you know what the work will cost.  The challenge of setting a project fee is that research firms are not Masters of the Universe that control outcome.

By-the-Month Risks

The risk of By-the-Month pricing is that a company could end up paying more for an executive search if, for example, a search is put on hold for a time or if hiring executives are on vacation and available for interviews. However, that risk is mitigated when companies have the option of switching the firm to another search. Also, the monthly model works better when a company can commit to a four or more searches a year. Doing so enables the firm to assign a specific team member to serve the client for concierge-quality service.

The True Cost of Executive Search

Last, price is not the same as the total cost of a search, a figure that is the one that I’ve found is the more accurate measure. It is a figure that also takes other factors into account, such as the cost of a position languishing unfilled, or of a cheaper, but ultimately bad hire. There is a reason that the most powerful and successful employers in the world continue to invest in quality executive search, whether through their own teams or in league with a trusted executive search partner. I’ll address that topic in another post.

Questions for the reader:

What do you pay for executive search? If you have paid different fees, what have you paid and what was the outcome? We welcome your thoughts and comments.

Related articles

• How to Conduct Executive Search In-House: Differently
• The LinkedIn Illusion
• Preemptive Calibration: Determining Who Is Good

Krista Bradford (39 Posts)

Krista Bradford is CEO of next-gen retained search firm The Good Search and of its research division Intellerati. In a former career, Ms. Bradford served as an award-winning television journalist and investigative reporter. Now she pursues truth, justice, and great talent in the executive suite . . .

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Traditional retained executive search firms have had a rough time over the past five years.  Executive search is a cyclical business.  So, naturally, headhunters saw business recede as it normally does in a recession, but then, for some reason, it didn’t all come back when it always had rebounded.  The meat-and-potatoes VP level executive searches had simply vanished. Clearly, this time was different. Something collectively had snapped.

Since the down turn, a growing number of large employers have assembled corporate recruiting teams to conduct executive search in-house. Intellerati partners with a number of those in-house teams and so we’ve benefited from the seismic shift, a trend that has been reported by Joann Lublin in the Wall Street Journal and by Carol Hymowitz and Jeff Green in BloombergBusinessweek.  In a fit of rugged determinism, corporations are hiring former retained search consultants to head up teams of executive recruiters and sourcers, who conduct recruiting research.  They do it to save money and to deliver better results, leveraging keener insight into cultural fit and greater access to hiring executives and stakeholders. But by replicating retained search firms in-house, they run the risk of replicating that model’s shortcomings.

On average, 40% of retained executive searches fail to complete.  Imagine if your phone didn’t work 40% of the time or if your Internet was down nearly 10 hours a day: that would be bad.  To be fair, search firms are not always to blame for a retained search that ends without making a placement.  Sometimes openings go away. Sometimes an internal candidate is selected. Sometimes clients drag their feet so long the candidate is snapped up by another employer or the candidate simply gets cold feet.  But whatever the reason, clearly  something is terribly wrong when employers spend $100,000 or more when they engage a search firm, only to have nothing to show for it nearly half of the time.

Matching Force With Big Data

Whether conducted internally or externally, executive searches will continue to fail at too high a rate because the research is flawed. Consequently, a star candidate that could have been hired isn’t because that executive wasn’t identified, profiled, or recruited. Most missed candidates are easy enough to find. It’s just that too much information gets in the way.  In fact, while it may seem counter-intuitive, the more candidate information there is, the harder search becomes. That’s because widely accepted sourcing “best practices” to identify and recruit top talent are hopelessly outdated. The approach hyper-focuses on gathering information, but rarely pauses to determine what it all means.  It doesn’t go to the trouble of connecting the dots.  That’s like buying a book, but refusing to read it, all the while insisting that simply having the book made you smarter. It simply doesn’t work that way.

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Krista Bradford (39 Posts)

Krista Bradford is CEO of next-gen retained search firm The Good Search and of its research division Intellerati. In a former career, Ms. Bradford served as an award-winning television journalist and investigative reporter. Now she pursues truth, justice, and great talent in the executive suite . . .

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Our Top 5 Talent Acquisition Inspirations for the New Year stand at the intersection of talent with big data. While great leaders are made of flesh and blood, the data that tell their story are made of binary zeros and ones. Every time we transact business online or at the supermarket, every time we interact with a government entity, every time we tweet, like, or comment, a digital record is born: we, increasingly, are the sum of all of that. There is a treasure trove of data available to be tapped — beyond candidate resumes and LinkedIn profiles — that can revolutionize search as we know it. Let the following examples serve as a guide:

1. Nate Silver. 

Nate Silver is a statistician and blogger who first rose to fame in 2008 when he called the presidential election with incredible accuracy, getting 49 out of 50 states right. But then in 2012 he topped himself: he correctly forecast how all 50 states would vote for president. He even predicted a tie in Florida and projected it eventually would tip to President Barack Obama, which is the equivalent of predicting a coin landing on its side. He did it by taking polling data, weighing it for past accuracy and running 40,000 computer simulations at a time. He is author of the newly published book The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t. He is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine and has appeared as a commentator on CNN and MSNBC. He has spoken at TED and SXSW, and has been named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the world. What does this have to do with executive search? Everything. (See #2.)

2. Moneyball, the book.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis is a book about the Oakland Athletics baseball team. More important, it’s a book about talent acquisition.  Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane had a problem: his recruiting budget was small than nearly every other team.  He couldn’t afford to sign Major League superstars. Instead, he decided to outsmart the richer teams. He signed undervalued players whom the scouts consider flawed but who have a knack for getting on base, scoring runs, and winning games.

3. Moneyball, the movie.

Moneyball is a 2011 biographical sports drama film directed by Bennett Miller from a screenplay by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane. If you haven’t yet seen the movie, it is time. There’s a reason Nate Silver got his start as a baseball statistician. To quote colleague Dan Lyons, “Bear in mind that before turning his attention to politics in 2007 and 2008, Silver was using computer models to make predictions about baseball. What does it mean when some punk kid baseball nerd can just wade into politics and start kicking butt on all these long-time “experts” who have spent their entire lives covering politics? It means something big is happening.”

4. Obama for America Data Analytics Team

The Presidential Election is our Nation’s executive search for Commander-in-Chief. No matter what your politics, the success of the Obama Campaign’s is a case to be studied. In fact, a right-leaning digital strategy firm Engage has just released its analysis comparing the technology strategies of the Obama and Romney campaigns. The report states that the Obama campaign’s analytics team employed 50 people, including an embedded analytics team measuring the campaign’s own internal operations. By comparison, the Romney campaign employed a data team of four people. Moreover, the Chief Digital Strategist for Obama for America Joe Rospars and his team did something no other campaign team had done before. They created a single massive system that merged the information collected from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers and consumer databases as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states. Time Magazine reported the new megafile didn’t just tell the campaign how to find voters and get their attention; it also allowed the number crunchers to run tests predicting which types of people would be persuaded by certain kinds of appeals. The Obama campaign’s so-called persuadability score “ modeled how susceptible an individual was to changing their mind based on campaign appeals.”

5. Numb3rs.

In this digital era, we, the people, are all reduced to binary zeros and ones as data about us is captured in applicant tracking systems, resume databases, and social networks and in a near-infinite amount of databases outside the world of HR. The secret to recruiting great talent lies in the numb3rs. And no wonder: so too does the secret of the universe.

Now that we’ve share our inspiration, we’ll move on the innovation in executive search in coming posts.

Krista Bradford (39 Posts)

Krista Bradford is CEO of next-gen retained search firm The Good Search and of its research division Intellerati. In a former career, Ms. Bradford served as an award-winning television journalist and investigative reporter. Now she pursues truth, justice, and great talent in the executive suite . . .

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As the novelty of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter wears off, some users are growing tired of getting friended, connected, poked, pitched, and, yes, even recruited.  That could explain why we’re hearing corporate recruiters complain that they’re not getting the enthusiastic response they’re used to getting online and why Intellerati has seen an influx of business from employers eager to recruit candidates who are not actively marketing their wares on LinkedIn. Maybe it is that what started as a place to connect with people we really know and people we’d like to know has turned into a place where we’re getting incessantly marketed to — not just by companies but by human beings who are attempting to be their own brands. I get that that is what executives have been told to do in book after book on how to optimize their careers. But, not everyone deserves to be a brand.   

Moreover, the “too much information” overload is exacerbated by jarring commentary from those with whom we’ve connected. We learn things we wish we didn’t know that an acquaintance inexplicably feels compelled to share online — like the time a friend uploaded gory accident aftermath photos of his own injuries or the time a family member made overtly racist remarks about our Nation’s President. And then there are Facebook friends whom we absolutely do not know —  a friend of a friend of a friend — whose self-indulgent updates take over our feeds with the mundane details of their existence. I get that they are trying to share.  I just wished they could write. In the end, we are left wondering who are these people?

2012 has been the summer of discontent for social networks. Social media stocks, with the exception of LinkedIn, have been getting hammered since going public. Facebook experienced its first ever year-over-year decline in unique visitors in June.  Yet, I suspect the real reason for the reduced responsiveness of social network users may be that we’re getting increasingly twitchy over privacy concerns. I know that embedded in the fine print of most social networks is legalese that says they get to do pretty much what they please. Moreover, there’s usually a clause that asserts they can change the rules at any time.  Until this year, the risk/reward ratio seemed to tilt in the favor of full participation with little concern about where all my personal information would end up.  I didn’t mind sharing my interests with the multinational corporation that happens to be my social network in exchange for getting content more aligned with my interests. But I started getting creeped out when I saw details gleaned from my social profiles aggregated, marketed, and sold elsewhere to anyone who “googles” my name. A serious line had been crossed when companies like MyLife popped up in search results, offering to serve up my personal home address and age in bold print. It didn’t really register at first until I had an intriguing conversation with the former CTO of Stanford. He told me that the University recently stopped using the year of graduation in the email addresses of its alumni. It made the change to its email naming convention after actors and other people of consequence had complained: those with a predilection to ageism simply do the math.

I don’t know how MyLife and other sites like it got my information. Moreover, I don’t know why it kept telling me someone had been searching for me  – a name they’d share if I’d only sign up — when apparently that never happened. (A lawsuit has been filed alleging that was a complete scam.) I do know this year a critical mass of weirdness had been reached. I spent the better part of a weekend opting out of places like MyLife because, to my knowledge. I never directly opted in.  (I’m pleased to say the instructions I followed actually worked.)

Still, removing personal information from the Internet is a little like whack-a-mole. You can can lock down your social network privacy settings, and still, you’re left with the sense that it might very well end up in someone else’s hands. LinkedIn user passwords were compromised back in June and the privacy policies of the all the leading social networks seem in a constant state of flux. LinkedIn was going to use member photos in advertising, turning users into shills, until a backlash taught the business social network it was not so smart a move.  And, in case you didn’t notice, social networks are making it harder for users to find and change their privacy settings. I understand that social networks need to monetize their businesses: they just don’t have to do it by being sneaky.

That we are all connected, that we are given a voice, that we can do amazing things — together — online, that remains the promise. But there’s a reason marketing communications professionals have noticed a decided decline in the responsiveness of the average social media user. It may be social media fatigue, but I suspect that lately it is more a matter of trust.

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Candidate sourcing teams could take a lesson from Steve Jobs.  The Apple founder understood better than most that “less is more”. While other companies piled on an overwrought array of features, Jobs opted for elegant simplicity — but one button on the iPad and iPhone — the Home button — but one click wheel on the Apple iPod. He took away things like floppy drives and hard disks, so that we could focus on what mattered most.

The Internet is serving up a near infinite number of job applicants and potential candidates. And compared to the opacity that clouded the recruiting process up until now, that seismic shift represents a tremendous opportunity for candidate sourcing teams, if it doesn’t kill them first.

Imagine standing in New York City’s Times Square on New Year’s Eve, moments before the ball drop at midnight, in a crush of a half-million to a million people. You know your ideal candidate is right there, with you, in that sea of people — only you can’t see him or her for the crowd. You start scanning an endless stream of people walking by. No, not that one. Not that one. Not him. Not her. You attempt to move to get a better vantage point to find “the one”, but soon all access is choked off. Soon, you are unable to focus on anyone but those that immediately surround you, those that, thanks to the growing crowd, are now invading your personal space, inches from you. You cannot move and, for the most part, you cannot see. That perfect hire is standing right in front of you, in plain sight, only your view is completely obliterated.

Employers are suffering from “too much information”. There are simply too many active and passive candidates that get in the way of the people that deserve to be hired. Most recruiting processes are applicant-centric, designed simply to process what comes over the transom. Because the Internet has made it possible for practically anyone to apply with a simple click of a mouse, they all do. Applicants that bear no resemblance to the job description apply en masse. Clients have told us that only about 1-2% of applicants meet the basic qualifications, meaning 98% of the time they spend sifting through useless applicant-after-applicant is wasted. Keyword filters help with some of the processing, but they are by no means perfect and often eliminate the very candidates you are seeking.

If that were not all, there is also an endless list of passive candidates. And, yes, it is thrilling to have all that talent within reach, as you surf the ‘net, but soon comes the crushing realization that there simply isn’t enough of you to manage it all. And the utter irony is that even with the millions that are now available online, only 60-75% of candidates are discoverable on the Internet, meaning that you’re missing one out of every three or four. That’s a pretty significant hole– dare I say “gaping maw” — in your sourcing strategy. Intellerati’s investigative approach to candidate sourcing regularly uncovers top talent who make it a practice to leave very few bread crumbs on the Internet — from powerful VIPs and luminaries to emergent stars. In other words, while you may be drowning in candidates, you still have not yet identified the best talent.

The Zen of Candidate Sourcing

Intellerati believes that executive search and talent acquisition teams deserve more than an endless list of potential candidates. You deserve to know who is good. To start, if your organization is committed to quality hires, you need to lay down some serious due diligence in the way of candidate identification to stop missing top talent keeping low profiles. However, basic candidate identification only gives you the “more”. It doesn’t tell you which passive candidates are good and which are sociopaths. Traditional name generation and profiling hasn’t been designed to take you from more to less, when it should. Recruiting research needs to move from the quantitative to the qualitative, one that identifies and calibrates the “best of the best” as it preemptively weeds out questionable prospects. In other words, one must design a simple, elegant process that focuses on the talent that matters. While the talent pool is near infinite, there is a finite number of executives and technologists who outperform. Steve Jobs had it right. Less is more.

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Preemptive calibration, also known as pre-referencing, is common practice in senior executive search, one that sourcing teams should emulate.  When was the last time you included a step in your candidate sourcing process to determine which experienced hire candidates are good from independent sources? I’m not talking about candidate assessment or reference checks. They come too late in the game and result in a lot of unhappy people, not the least of which is the hiring executive, should the assessment or references not check out. No one wants to discover that a candidate that you’ve screened, interviewed, and were on the verge of hiring was not what he appears to be. Alternatively, perhaps you currently work for an organization that has a policy not to check references, which then practically guarantees you will then hire that “special someone”. The problem with waiting until the very end to determine who’s good and who’s not means you’ve invested all that time processing a candidate who is unworthy. You may even result in a bad hire. Clearly, there has to be better way.

Preemptive Calibration – A New Step in Candidate Sourcing

Recruiting research should develop qualitative information about passive candidates early on to reduce the risk of candidate implosion. Quite simply, you must insert a step in your sourcing process to calibrate or pre-reference candidates to determine who’s got sterling reputations and who’s got rusted ones.

Preemptive calibration is a light reference with former co-workers (never current) and others who might be familiar with a candidate’s work. It is best done by not mentioning a candidate’s name, but rather by steering a conversation so that your reference will mention it.   Pre-referencing has to be done artfully and with discretion. You must never indicate a candidate is in touch or interviewing with your or your firm.  You must never focus the conversation too much on the individual you are sourcing. Be sure to discuss other individuals as you “network” and request insights as to who is good.  In doing so, you’ll learn who’s smart (but a handful), who’s up-and-coming (but arrogant), and ultimately, who is unquestionably awesome. Pre-referencing enables you to be forewarned and forearmed. It alerts you going into the interview process as to whether there are issues that require further probing. Discreetly sussing out reputation is a delicate art and requires an extra step on the front end of the search process, but it quickly winnows down your long list to a short list of contenders, so you don’t have to waste time calling everyone up to recruit them. At a minimum, it can help you prioritize who’s hot and who’s not.

A caveat about preemptive calibration — one must always consider the source, the motivations, and evaluate that data point in context. When a couple of independent sources agree, you weigh that information more heavily. When sources disagree or are painting vastly different pictures as to whether a candidate is worthy, it time to focus on other candidates where the reputation is consistently above the bar.

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Random Sourcing.

A database search here, a little Google there, a LinkedIn query or two and pretty soon anyone who fancies himself a recruiter can assemble a list of potential candidates that, upon first glance, looks as though they might be right. But upon closer scrutiny, you’ll quickly discover that the research is flawed. It has failed to include qualified talent from top target companies. In fact, about half of that talent is MIA. It includes sub-par talent from companies from which you would never recruit. It misses potential candidates at other relevant major players and emergent companies that are giving your competitors a run for their money. Worse, it includes talent with unsavory backgrounds and questionable reputations, candidates who are quite simply not worth your time. Like rolling dice, random research leaves your process up to chance. Only with dice, there is an underlying statistical probably of certain outcomes. With haphazard, catch-as-catch-can sourcing, there is no such logic. In other words, it is illogical. But it is what recruiting teams do every day.

Random Sourcing: Certain Chaos

For talent acquisition organizations where recruiting more resembles dialing “911″, surfacing candidates that are simply “good enough” often is all an over-worked, under-resourced recruiting team feels can do.  However, if you stop and zoom out, you’ll soon notice that a tremendous amount of time and energy is wasted processing applicants that are “off” and recruiting candidates who should never have been considered in the first place. In other words, there are enormous inefficiencies that come baked into the recruiting process. And that, my friends, is an opportunity in the making.

Recruiting research and  candidate sourcing intelligence is designed to wring inefficiencies out of recruiting to yield a better result. There is a significant benefit to pausing to put your thinking cap on and formulating a research strategy, to deploying sourcers with investigative research expertise, and to supercharging your efforts with computer-assisted research and competitive intelligence. This isn’t about doing more work. It is about doing less. about honing in with laser-like focus on the shortest path to best talent.

One simple test to see whether your sourcing is operating at the optimal level is simply to ask your recruiters a simple question: “how do you know these are the best candidates the market has to offer?” If your recruiting team’s response resembles a deer frozen in headlights, chances are they’re working too hard. The good news is you’ve just identified a tremendous opportunity. Seize the day.

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Candidate mapping —  tracing the reporting relationships of prospective candidates you identify — is a powerful way to bulletproof talent acquisition. When you map specific teams at target companies out of which you recruit, you are raising your game by making sure you that your don’t miss talent that should be included on your list of prospects.  However, despite that benefit, recruiting and candidate sourcing teams regularly  skip the org charting step and, as a result, regularly fail to discover A-players – candidates who, without a doubt, would be perfect for the job if  only those teams knew they were there.

Candidate Mapping for Talent You’d Miss on LinkedIn

How is it that candidate mapping or org charting might surface talent that might otherwise lay fallow were a sourcing team to rely exclusively on LinkedIn instead ?  LinkedIn data is only as good as the users who enter the information. It frequently lacks specificity and, in many cases, the information is out of date.  That means there are lots of people whose profiles show they’re currently working at a company, when they have moved on and actually are working at one of your target companies. That lapse is a hole in your sourcing research. In addition, there is still a sizable chuck of people who have not gone social due to concerns about privacy, data security, identity theft, or because they don’t want  to appear as though they are looking for a job.  The more powerful the executive, often more elusive they become on social networks.  For instance,  I’ve noticed that powerful Hollywood executives either avoid social networks  entirely — cultivating an elite image by making themselves “unlisted” online — or they prefer Facebook to LinkedIn for networking, because the networking is easier to do “behind closed doors” with select Facebook friends, much like a back room a at hot nightclub that admits only VIPs.

When does it make sense to map talent?  It makes sense to map target companies out of which your regularly recruit, and to refresh that candidate sourcing data on a regular basis. Candidate mapping makes sense for senior-level executive searches whenever the aim is to hire the best talent the market has to offer.  It also makes sense whenever you have an important search that has hit the wall. Intellerati is regularly called on to rescue ailing search efforts for openings that prior search firms and recruiting teams have struggled without success to fill. Every time we’ve been brought in to help, the client makes it a point to advise us not to look for candidates that live within recruiting distance because they’ve “already seen everybody” over the course of the 9 months or year that they’ve been looking.  However, in every instance, we’ve come back with a robust list of prospective local talent. While I’d like to say that identify those missed candidates was hard —  we are capable of doing real investigative research — in most cases the candidates were pretty easy to find.  However, those individuals were overlooked  because prior efforts had not gone to the trouble of mapping relevant teams at all of the target companies.

The next time you have a critical search or a multiple openings that send you back the the same target companies over and over again, experiment with mapping candidates and building out org charts of their teams. It  is the only way to identify and plug holes in your research as you discover great talent. Executive maps turn candidate chaos and they lay down serious due diligence. The org charts tell you where the talent is and where it is not. It documents where you’ve been and where you’ve still have left to go.   It is the only way to answer the question , “Do we have everyone?”  For executive search and mission-critical openings, candidate mapping offer a road map to never getting lost.

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