Time to fill is always front of mind for clients and always a close second behind making a hire who is qualified for the job and a good fit for the role. By speeding up your agency’s time-to-fill metric, you can improve your executive search business model and catch the attention of more prestigious clients who are searching for an agency proven to hire top talent faster than others.
Here are some of the most effective ways to speed your agency’s time-to-fill for executive placements:
Part of any business’s success is understanding and executing the core competencies required for successful creation of that business’s product or service and delivery of their product or service to their target consumer. When it comes executive search and recruitment, a lot of these same business principles apply in creating an efficient time-to-fill business model.
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Understanding the compatibility between your firm’s capabilities and your client’s needs is one of the first steps in achieving an efficient and quick time-to-fill record. By focusing on where you excel, your firm can identify and gravitate towards clients and fields that are conducive to more efficient and faster executive search projects.
It might seem counterintuitive, but avoiding recruitment in certain industries or fields might be the best option if your firm isn’t geared toward those potential hires. Not only will this allow you to be more selective and efficient with your target clients, it will also help close out projects at a higher rate and lower your time-to-fill metric, leading to similar projects in the future.
Ultimately, this strategy will help drive down your overall time-to-fill average and allows you to bolster your competitive edge by presenting a history of successfully completed projects to future clients.
A big part of identifying your firm’s niche in the executive placement market comes down to finding ideal matches for client-recruiter compatibility. Better matches between clients and recruiters within your firm will ultimately lead to faster executive search and placement rates.
Of course, evaluating where individual recruiters have had the most success is a good place to start when predicting compatibility with the executive search needs of potential future clients. There are, however, other strategies and techniques to consider when working with clients.
A simple but understated practice that helps connect your clients with your most compatible recruiters is transparency. A lack of transparency between clients and recruiters can lead to further complications in the future. If a client doesn’t effectively communicate their company’s benchmarks and KPIs for executive candidates, for example, it becomes difficult to know if an individual candidate is best suited to fit their needs. Similarly, miscommunication between clients and your agency can lead to assigning recruiters who are less compatible than other recruiters in your agency.
Defining goals, presenting compatible recruiters, agreeing on an executive search plan, and having a clear and steady line of communication will help your firm asses potential clients and only assign recruiters to projects where their background and skill sets will result in quick placements.
Even with leading strategies and procedures in place, your firm needs the best tools to ensure your executive search projects are moving towards a high quality placement at an accurate and steady pace. This comes down to providing your team with the best recruitment software to make every step of the recruiting process as swift and easy as possible.
With respect to time-to-fill, you need recruitment software that’s precise and swift, allowing you to reach the best candidates before your competitors do. Loxo improves time-to-fill by automatically sourcing candidates and getting you their contact information without the tedious search for this information. Loxo’s ability to provide all the information you need, close at hand, will allow your team to seamlessly gauge and contact candidates in a timely manner.
Part of transparency, client-to-firm rapport, and building long-term success is maintaining strong client onboarding practices to create stronger relationships with clients. Strengthening your client onboarding process will better define your executive candidate search parameters and help you get a better sense of your client’s needs, which ultimately leads to more qualified candidates that you can present at a faster rate.
Communicate with clients, take the time to understand their company and executive KPIs, and make sure that their goals are at the forefront of your candidate search. When you put time into understanding your client’s strategic vision, they can begin to see your firm as a valuable partner in line with the long-term success of their business. Not only are you earning the trust of your client, but you’re gaining a deeper understanding of their needs and, as a result, which candidates will meet their needs and lower your time-to-fill averages.
Once you’ve set your goals with clients, maintained ongoing communications, and shown your dedication as a partner, measure your success asking for and reviewing client feedback, identifying points of friction, and tracking metrics to know what’s working and what isn’t with your client service model.
By understanding the needs, qualifications, and capabilities of both your clients and candidates, your firm has the unique opportunity to facilitate offers in a quick and effective manner. With an understanding of both sides of the hiring process, the onus is on recruiters to present candidates with the right background to clients with the appropriate needs. Similarly, it is also the duty of recruiters to negotiate on behalf of candidates for the job conditions and compensation that they have been looking for in an executive role.
While tempting, never try to sell either party an offer that doesn’t fit their best needs or interests. This leads to diminishing returns on your efforts and an ineffective system that hurts everyone in the long run. By facilitating offer negotiations, you can help both clients and candidates more quickly reach a middle ground that works for both parties, thereby speeding up your time-to-fill.
While you want to be quick in your time-to-fill turnarounds, you always want to be precise. Trust your tools and rely on your best practices to produce solid matches, build trust and loyalty with clients, and build a reputation as a leading recruiter in the industry. Loxo is an all-in-one recruitment platform that combines your ATS and CRM, and provides automatic sourcing powered by AI to improve your agency’s time to fill metric. Instead of spending weeks searching for executive candidates, you only have to choose between the top candidates that have already been sourced into your ATS. To see how Loxo improves the speed of executive search projects, just schedule a demo here.
