Executive recruiters provide services to employers in search of special talent. At the highest levels, executive recruiters shape the enterprise by finding candidates for positions as members of the board of directors and C-level officers. In the middle ranks, executive recruiters locate candidates for sales and marketing, service delivery, account managers, internal sourcing consultants and managers of the procurement, sourcing and outsourcing functions and shared services organizations.
Skill Sets for Successful Sourcing Management
Sourcing has become a specialty with its own unique skill sets.
- In business strategy for enterprises implementing a sourcing strategy, a senior executive needs to be in charge of integrating sourcing policies and responsibilities across the enterprise. Such executives often come from the ranks of consultants and service provider executives.
- In business development, the sales cycles are long. Value-creating business development executives for service providers need skills in the basics of outsourcing and a sensitivity to the many forces that drive outsourcing demand. Such forces include a company’s capital spending and capital structure, corporate restructuring, changes in senior executives’ attitudes and agendas, mergers and acquisitions, spin-offs, litigation and other exogenous variables over which neither the employer nor the employee has any control or capacity to predict.
- In account management, project management skills must augment politics, persuasion, liaison, problem solving and hand-holding skills.
- In service delivery, transborder service delivery requires experience and insights that bridge the distances, cultures, languages and business and legal environments in international sourcing.
Types of Services
Executive recruiters support internal HR departments. The recruiters offer search services to locate candidates. They also offer pre-search services to identify emerging needs for new skill sets and restructuring of the organizational human resources chart.
Types of Search
There are basically two types of search services:
- Retained search, with a fixed fee, periodic payments and no guarantee to the employer that the search will result in any success; and
- Contingent search, generally with a success fee representing a percentage of the successful candidate’s first year’s compensation.
Contracts for consulting or search services typically are relatively simple, provided that sufficient details are provided to define what constitutes “success” or “completion.”
Executive Search in Outsourcing
Outsourcing has become a niche industry. Its unique human resource needs are targeted by a few specialists in executive recruitment for either enterprise customers or service providers in the particular industries that the outsourcer serves.