Search and Recruitment

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Talent Acquisition is one of the most important functions of a business and one of the hardest to get right. Tapping your corporate network is full of relational challenges and advertising externally is hit and miss. Advertise the role at just the right time in just the right way and you can strike gold. Advertise a couple weeks too late or too early and you might miss the candidate you need.

Search or Recruitment?

Search is a highly defined process of finding the right candidate, usually undertaken for senior candidates:

1. Establish the important characteristics of a successful candidate and the priority of the hire.

2. Market research

3. Agree on the search strategy - are we wanting to make a lot of noise on the street or keep the hiring discrete?

4. Agree on the message and strategy for attracting the right candidate.

5. Attract and evaluate potential candidates

6. Present the best candidates

7. Conclude the search

Recruitment is a simpler process of recruiting people to fill roles in the organisation but less detailed and defined. Usually a shorter process of filling more junior roles and at times high volumes of similar roles.

This can be through and out-sourced model where we take care of the whole process, or through a contingency model.

Contingency or Retained?

Contingency is the most common model in recruitment and simply works on the basis that payment is only made for a successful placement. 

Retained fees are paid in three instalments during the recruitment process, usually at the start of the process, at interview stage and at final placement.

Which model is right depends on the outcome you want. Contingency is cheap, you only pay if the placement is made and you can engage as many recruiters as you want. The problem for the client is that engaging multiple recruiters creates a lot of admin, a lot of relationships to manage, fights over candidates and various terms and fee scales to keep on top of. The problem for the recruiter is that you have to manage and prioritise which placements are worth putting your time and effort in to. If the role is hard to fill because it's a senior hire or a niche hire then a contingent recruiter has to consider if the investment of time and energy is worth the potential reward.

The Retained model has many advantages. The recruiter is fully engaged in the process and will prioritise this search over others. The recruiter is engaged exclusively so there is only one process to manage, no admin headaches, no duplicated meetings to brief the recruiter etc. It's efficient, it's in depth, it's highly relational and both parties are committed to the outcome.

The only downside of the process is that there is a risk that the recruiter will be unable to fill the role. This risk is real, though retained searches generally have a success rate above 95%. If you have a recruiter you know and trust to deliver the work then there should be no concern moving to a retained model and you will get high quality candidates, delivered faster, cleaner and with no headaches.

For more information or a discussion please get in touch using our contact page or call Daniel on 0401 905 153.