Clockwork Recruiting Blog

As an executive recruiter, one of the key components of your job is to consistently keep your search project moving forward. That’s a multifaceted responsibility, and too often a recruiter will make one mistake in particular that can significantly slow their search project: not scheduling the interviews between the candidates and the client themselves.

Running regular status calls is an essential component of successful retained search. You come together weekly with your client and team to review completed work, align expectations, and establish next steps for the coming week. This cadence not only keeps your client informed, but it also serves to keep them engaged and providing the necessary feedback you need to keep your search running smoothly and effectively.

You’re two weeks into a new search. Having set a sound search strategy with your client at the onset of the project, it’s enabled your researcher to make good progress sourcing a solid list of potential candidates. You want to review the progress with your client on your weekly status call but need a better way to present such a lengthy list of candidates. One that’s easy for the client to view and provide feedback in order to keep the project moving forward efficiently and effectively.

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.

Managing inordinate numbers of candidates throughout a search project can become a logistical nightmare. For each search, researchers and recruiters inevitably have to make countless contact information updates, review work history, capture notes and status changes, log outreach efforts, and rate potential candidate fit. On top of all that, candidate information can live in a number of places—making this even more challenging to get a handle on.

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.