They are looking for you, so why can’t you find them? This is an age old dilemma as companies searching for that one perfect executive struggle to find the perfect match. The problem isn’t that the executive candidates aren’t out there. It’s the amount of work involved with finding just the right one that makes the process so frustrating.

Going It Alone

There are many resources available to find executive level candidates on your own. You can go online and use business networking sites like LinkedIn or you can use job hunting sites like Monster. You can go the old school route of putting ads in local papers or hanging flyers as well.

While all of these strategies work well for companies looking to hire a lot of people for entry level positions, they don’t work well for companies trying to find elite level executives. The problem is your ads will draw in hundreds if not thousands of applicants and around 90% or more of them won’t be qualified for your executive position.

It turns into a waste of time as you try to search for that one qualified resume in a growing pile of unqualified applicants.

Seeking Help

There are professional recruiters, often referred to as “head hunters,” that will do everything short of officially hiring an executive for you. They will scout out candidates that meet all of your requirements and expectations and then they may even perform background checks and deliver pre-interviews to screen out those not suitable to your business.

You can give them any amount of power to help weed out the unqualified candidates and brings the best picks to you. They do their job while you are free to focus on your own work keeping your company successful.

The Right Hiring Strategy

So, what is the best way to hire executives in Canada today? It falls in the middle of these two options. You do want to have an active hand in selecting your executive level employees, but you don’t have the time to do all of the tedious work yourself. Hiring a recruiting firm to scout out high quality candidates and filter out the unqualified applicants is a great option. You can then make the final determination on who gets the job.

When you add up all the hours that would be spent trying to recruit your own executives, you will see how hiring a recruiting firm can actually pay off in the long run. While they will want some type of finder’s fee, they will save you so weeks if not months of your own searching. They speed up the process which is well worth the small finder’s fee you have to hand over in the end.

You are now spending more time wading through this high volume response than you are spending tending to your business. You’re pondering the idea of hiring an in-house human resources department just to take care of background checks, interviews, and other tasks that you are now discovering actually take up a lot of time and resources.

Most of the resumes you look at don’t have the qualifications you listed in your ads and it takes days just to find a handful of candidates worth interviewing. You grow frustrated and feel the hairs turning gray on your head as responses to your ads continue to pour in.

During interviews you toss out that small handful of seemingly qualified candidates because in real person the candidates are not suited to senior executive level positions. You are back to square one, trying to find qualified candidates in that growing mountain of resumes.

Is this really the best way to go about hiring senior level executives? There has to be a better way, right?

You’re right if you are reading this and assuming there has to be a much smarter way to tackle this process. You know that you need to hire the right employee since so much power is given to senior level executives, but that doesn’t mean the process has to be complicated and take weeks or months.

1. You can get much better results by following this process instead:
2. Find the most reputable executive recruiting firm in your local area and hire them.
3. Give your recruiters the details on what type of executive you are looking for.
4. Focus on running your business while your recruiters find qualified candidates, run background checks, and find the best candidates worth your interviewing time.
5. Spend very little time interviewing the right candidates and choose the best one for your executive position.
6. Get on with business now that you have the right executive on board.

Doesn’t that process sound refreshing? Wouldn’t it be great to focus on your own job while a recruiter or “head hunter” does their own job and brings the best candidates to you?

Unless you have a lot of experience hiring top level executives and have contacts that can put you in touch with many of the best candidates in your field today, you have no business trying to hire executive level employees on your own. It simply takes too much time and if you miss something in a background check or interview the consequences could be stiff for your business.

When your executives are inexperienced, careless, or otherwise inadequate your business will suffer. You can overcome foul behavior of an entry level worker rather easily, but the mistakes and dishonest decisions from your senior team members could devastate the future of your business.

That is why you need to seriously consider how you go about hiring executives to join the top tiers of your team. It doesn’t matter how big or small your company may be. You will be entrusting these executives with the future of your business and you have to ensure they are right for the job.

Possible Outcome

Let’s look at what your possible outcome are when hiring senior members for your company. On the one hand you can make a smart decision and hire someone with a lot of experience, knowledge, and a proven reputation for being honest, creative, and productive.

The outcome here is great, right? Your business will be highly successful as this type of knowledgeable, passionate executive will steer your business to the top of your industry.

Then there is another potential outcome entirely on the other end of the spectrum. You may unknowingly hire someone who doesn’t have the knowledge required to make profitable decisions for your company and before you know it your company could be in the hole. You could also hire someone who is less than honest and who causes big problems for your company with illegal practices.

The outcome here is not what you want. Unfortunately, in most cases it will be too late before you find out that this latter outcome has taken place. The only way to prevent that is to take greater care when you are hiring senior members of your team. Remember, there is a lot more at stake when hiring an executive than when hiring a cashier or waitress.

Smart Hiring Practices

The best way to hire senior members of your team that are guaranteed to steer your company in the right direction is to hire the services of elite recruiters. There are firms of recruiters that make it their businesses to match companies big and small up with the highest quality professionals.

The best professional recruiters will also help screen all job applicants to weed out those who don’t have the experience, knowledge, education or other requirements that you demand. They will also help you sort out those with undesirable background features that could put your business at risk in the future.

Doing all of this for yourself would take a lot of time and you would still miss many of the best candidates and end up settling for someone not perfectly fit to the position. You can avoid all of those negative potential outcomes by having a professional help you find the best senior team members for your company.

The logic here makes sense, but the results are anything but appealing. It may be easy to find decent cashiers or waitresses with an ad in the local paper, but finding qualified executives that can bring great success for your business is a different story. These executives will dictate the future of your business and there are a lot of things that can go wrong when you try to hire them on your own.

Take a look at five reasons these higher positions should always be filled with the guidance of an executive recruiting firm, or professional “head hunters.” This will highlight many of the obstacles in your way when you try to go it alone without professional recruiting services.

#1: The future of your company is at risk.

This is by far the biggest reason to hire a professional recruiting agency when you are looking for senior level management or business executives. You will be handing over more than five or six figure salaries over to these employees. Executive level employees also get tremendous power over your company.

Someone who doesn’t have the company’s best intentions at heart or who doesn’t know what they are doing could run your business into the ground. You decrease your chances of this happening when you use a professional recruiting service to help you screen and hand select your executive professionals.

#2: You don’t have time to train someone without the right experience and knowledge.

You may be able to pay an executive less if they are untrained, uneducated, or lacking knowledge and experience. The problem is you have to train them in all aspects of the job, which means paying two people for that position during the training.

You don’t have the time to train someone who isn’t qualified for an executive position and when you use a recruiting service to find the right candidate you won’t have to. Instead of settling for the best new employee you can find you can select from several different educated, experienced, top quality professionals all suited to start immediately with little to no training.

#3: Background research on candidates can become time consuming.

Checking into the background of an executive employee is crucial, but it can take a lot of time and gets tedious. Allowing a recruiting firm to do it for you frees up time while allowing you to only interview reputable candidates.

#4: Professional executive head hunters have resources and access to professionals that you simply don’t have.

Someone working in the business of finding executive job candidates will have access to many professional job searchers you will never find on your own. It is their business to have access to these people, so why not hire them and let them bring the best matches to your door?

#5: You don’t have months to wait for the perfect candidate to walk through your door.

Bottom line, you don’t have time to search for your own executives. The searching, background checking, interviewing, and comparing process eats up a lot of time. When you have a recruiting firm on your side you can focus on keeping your business afloat while they do a lot of the tedious tasks of searching for your next big executive.