Are you struggling to find the right kind of candidates for your senior or director level positions? Do you know who you want, but just can’t seem to secure the hire? Issues like these could be down to a number of factors, including stale self-promoting job adverts and poor engagement with your hiring process. If you find that you recognise one or more of the following red flags, it’s time to consult with a professional executive search firm.

1. Your job adverts don’t talk the talk

It’s all well and good having a conventional advert - candidate requirements, role responsibilities, expected salary etc. - in fact nowadays they form the backbone of almost all conventional recruitment campaigns. All a bit 1980s to be honest. The problem is that even when these adverts are hosted on sites like Jobsite and Indeed, how can you be sure they’re speaking to the right people? A lot of clients enlist the help of our talent resourcing specialists when their job adverts either aren’t gaining a response or are attracting the wrong calibre of candidates altogether. By adopting a method that attracts the right people whilst adding some "yes" gates we connect with the right people in a way to gain their confidence in calling.

2. You just don’t know where to look

When you’re recruiting for a senior position within your company, either managerial or directorial, the chances are that your ideal candidate will probably fall into the passive category of job seekers, meaning they’re happy in their current role.

As opposed to standard recruitment circumstances, this often means that there isn't a ‘bank’ of candidates with the relevant experience ready to apply. Executive search firms make use of a wealth of referrals within your industry to identify and target the key figures occupying senior positions. As these candidates aren’t normally active job seekers, they don’t typically respond to marketing or job adverts, which is why the integral expertise and connections of professional talent resourcing firm gets the results you need.

3. You’re struggling to secure the candidates you really want to hire 

Even if you’ve managed to accurately identify and contact the appropriate candidates for your open senior management positions, you’ll quickly realise that convincing them to leave their current job is a wholly different battle in itself. You can leave yourself in a position that will be based on monetary reward rather than be a career opportunity. That method is very costly and one of the weakest methods to hire, it's based on cash rather than commitment. This also makes it easy for the person to be counter offered, which we know is likely for senior hires that control the success of a company or division.

Obviously, as a senior member of an existing company, they probably enjoy a number of financial benefits and privileges that come with the position - so how can your company compete? As professional executive search consultants, sales and marketing is a large part of our skill set; we specialise in first assessing whether the person would be interested in having a conversation about your potential opportunity, never selling your position to the candidate until we know that your need is their ambition.

When we are on the same page with the candidate we can them align them with what you could offer, of course, if they are successful in the hiring process. We then know if your offer package is truly valued by them.

When it comes to managerial recruitment, spending a lot of time and resources trying to source candidates internally can often come to outweigh the financial investment incurred by consulting with an executive search firm.

Whilst you are trawling LinkedIn no one is steering your company to success, whilst outsourcing to a junior manager is an option, it's less likely that a potential senior hire will show interest.

Our talent resourcing team specialise in streamlining the process of recruiting for senior manufacturing positions, identifying and shortlisting the appropriate candidates and presenting you with THE top talent to grow your business.