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.

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.

In Retained Search, a recruiter’s candidate screening process has a major impact on the progress, duration, and success of search projects. While many methods are used to track and record “scorecards” when sourcing candidates, Clockwork’s built-in process methodology incorporates an easy, efficient, effective—and trackable—method to qualify or disqualify people during the research stage of a successful retained search process.

The responsibility of finding new work and closing new opportunities to keep a business viable and growing is a constant — and critical — focus for search firm owners. This is on top of managing their team, putting out fires if things go wrong, and, most importantly, keeping clients happy. It can be a challenging juggling act and a daily grind. Clockwork was created to support these retained search firm owners in every aspect of their business — from finding new work through successfully closing out projects with delighted clients.

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.