5 Strategies That Have Shaped Our Recruitment Firm’s Success

Today’s guest blogger is Bill Benson with WilliamCharles Search Group located in Grand Rapids, MI. WilliamCharles is an executive search and professional recruiting firm specialized in finding managerial and executive talent in finance, HR, operations, sales/marketing as well as president/CEO roles. They have a concentration of clients in Michigan but they also work across the US. Bill is the secretary/treasurer of the NPAworldwide Board of Directors.

Over the years my business partner and I have tried many things. Many of those ventures, ideas or new approaches have either not worked well or completely failed. Fortunately… some of those strategies have taken seed and helped us build our recruitment firm. Here are five GOOD decisions that we have made along the way.

1. We focused more on the middle market rather than large companies. This gave us more opportunity to build a value-added relationship with decision makers rather than recruiters. It enabled us to function more as partners rather than vendors.
2. We decided to take an intentional approach toward placing the relationship ahead of the transaction. This led to a concerted focus on quality at every interface with the client. We decided we needed structured processes in our recruitment firm that ensure consistency for taking more in-depth job orders, more detailed candidate submission process, 360 degree references, etc. Our quality standards became part of our marketing pitch and it also has driven the need to be more selective working only on “A” job orders.
3. We cut our ties to job boards and exclusively focused on recruiting passive candidates. How much value do you add by simply working the same candidate pool as your clients? We have learned that old school recruiting of passive candidates adds more value and is much more sustainable when times get tough.
4. We ventured into engaged and retained search. Doing this provided the following benefits: forced us to build more client service into processes, increased the average size of our fee and gave us greater credibility even with our contingent clients. We have a nice mix of business between retained, engaged (contingent with a commitment fee on the front end) and contingent.
5. We joined NPAworldwide. We had some success making splits, which was our main reason for joining. NPAworldwide has allowed us to expand our geographic reach and our functional capability. While this does not always result in a split, it does always provide additional candidates to our clients which leads to a higher close rate. We have also had many side benefits of being part of this network. Many of the ideas we have employed have come with some connection to NPAworldwide, either through a sponsored training program or member best practice. We take advantage of many of the sponsor partnered discounts.

Usually the road to success winds through good decisions and bad. The key is to timely dump the bad decisions and be patient and allow the good things to come.