Clockwork Recruiting Blog

In our last article “Best Practices For Marketing Your Executive Search Firm” we discussed how to leverage your executive search specialization to find new executive search work. By completing the Specialization Worksheet and Targeted Marketing Worksheets you have generated a list of prospects and companies to target using SEO, paid social media campaigns and digital marketing channels. Now that you have set these marketing plans into action, or partnered with a marketing expert, new leads will begin to come through your website and fill your sales pipeline. When a prospective lead hits your inbox your next steps will be to:

So you’ve reached out to the candidates with the most potential and have dwindled that list down to the top 10%. By this point, you should have garnered as much information as possible on those you interviewed during your outreach. More specifically, you should have ascertained whether they are QIA, how they fit the role and how they compare with their peers.

The key to finding new clients and winning new search work for your executive search firm lies in efficiently marketing to the right clients. Typically, executive search firms are reluctant to include marketing within their budgets, however, the ROI can be substantial if a minimal marketing spend results in $60,000+ in search fees. Here are two fundamental ways you can refine your marketing strategy to attract the right types of clients and identify new prospects to target.

Executive recruiting tends to be an outbound activity. The best candidates are already gainfully employed somewhere and aren’t posting their resumes online. Hence, effective outreach is one of the most critical aspects of an executive search.

Whether you’re doing research at an executive search firm, an in-house or corporate executive recruiting team, or an institutional investor, at some point you will need to demonstrate the competence and thoroughness of your work. Executives are key hires and represent the future success for the company. Your stakeholders will want to know you’ve left no stone unturned.