Clockwork Recruiting Blog

It’s common practice in executive search for recruiters to send out “success emails” following the placement of a candidate. The purpose of these emails is simple: to alert colleagues, past clients, and also potential clients that you or your firm just completed a search. It’s a PR announcement that doubles, in this sense, as a marketing mechanism. It’s a smart practice.

The problem that many recruiters run into, however, is that they blindly send these emails out to all of the contacts in their network—even if the placement they’re announcing isn’t relevant to that particular contact.

There is more to executive recruiting than quickly finding and placing quality candidates. Yes, finding the right candidate is a key aspect of search, but as an executive recruiter, a huge part of your role is partnering with clients in a consultative capacity.

I’ve worked in the search industry for most of my career. Over the years—first as a recruiter and later as the founder and CEO of a recruitment software company—I’ve developed a deep understanding of how this industry operates. Probably the most important lesson I’ve learned is how successful executive search firms operate.

This article is the second of a 12-article series about The Eight Stages of Successful Retained Search. By reading the entire series, you and your search team will learn the overall retained search process, how each role is connected and dependent on the others, and how to most effectively proceed from the first stage to the last.

This article is the third of a 12-article series about The Eight Successful Stages of   Retained Search. By reading the entire series, you and your search team will learn the overall retained search process, how each role is connected and dependent on the others, and how to most effectively proceed from the first stage to the last.

This article is the fourth of a 12-article series about The Eight Stages of Successful Retained Search. By reading the entire series, you and your search team will learn the overall retained search process, how each role is connected and dependent on the others, and how to most effectively proceed from the first stage to the last.