A fresh look at the trends and processes of Headhunting
Article by Hannele Maijala – Senior Associate, Nordic Minds
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
What is happening in the Executive Search industry?
The recruitment process in Executive Search is being challenged. Surely, due to Covid-19 but also due to a longer process of change that has started way before. Today, when looking for candidates, it isn’t just about finding the right skillset and experience, but it’s also about finding the best cultural and personality matches between a candidate and hiring organization. It is also about finding the candidates that create sustainable results for their companies and not only stand out from the crowd by hard skills. Finding and hiring candidates with sought-after profiles and skill sets is a continuous work in progress. Therefore, it’s important to research, update and implement new recruiting trends to stay on top of the game. But what are the game-changing recruiting techniques that'll probably also shape the future of executive search in the long run – and how do you shape your recruitment process today?
1. Digitize
Today there are numerous ways to digitize your recruitment process without making it impersonal. The easiest is to start conducting video supported interviews for the preselection phase. This is a way to increase efficiency and reduce expenditure for the same result. You should still always remember to include face-to-face interactions in your recruitment strategy (if possible) – to ensure personal match and cultural fit. First interviews with candidates can easily be conducted via smart video tools.
2. Grow human centricity
Executive Search and recruiting are turning more and more employee centric. Companies have become increasingly engaged with Employer Branding – candidate attraction by providing them the value they’re looking for before they even know it themselves. To be able to understand those values, more collaboration and empathy is needed in the process.
3. Use Artificial Intelligence
AI allows consultants more time, as with automatization in certain parts of the research and analytics, the process is faster and more productive. AI could be used for example in screening, communicating with candidates and clients or in data collection. Even if AI will be an important asset in future recruiting, human factor will always remain essential – as the parts that require personal and emotional engagement, can't be replaced. Instead, AI will automate more menial, structured tasks and free time for consultants to focus more on building their skillsets that require a human touch.
4. Be transparent
Recruiting and attracting talent is all about collaborating with trust, reliability and credibility towards clients and candidates and between candidates and hiring organizations. The best way to serve all, is to provide an open and clear communication right from the start and ensure transparency about the process, timeline and expectations continuously. By clearly communicating, disappointments are avoided, retention is improved, and client and candidate expectations are being met. And remember, honesty works both ways – if you want candidates or clients to be honest with you, you should be honest right back. We at Nordic Minds are using a custom-made tool called Future Hunt to manage the relationship between client and consultant by maximizing transparency as well as collaboration.
5. Improve agile methods
As the future of Executive Search continues to develop, one clear trend is agile recruiting. Agile recruiting aims to make the recruitment process faster, more efficient, and improve the overall communication process of the team – creating better, more collaborative, and more dynamic approaches to getting things done at high quality with continuous improvements. The key is to build up your dream team, define clear goals, build a lean recruitment strategy, leverage technology, as well as regularly conduct follow-up meetings to measure, analyse, improve and predict.
6. Develop your diversity recruiting strategy
Most would agree that a diverse team helps companies to be more innovative and creative, to achieve better results and improve better overall performance. Having different perspectives and backgrounds in your team will contribute to more diverse ideas to help solve problems and drive innovation – and in the end business growth. Developing your diversity & inclusion recruiting strategy will help you support your clients in e.g. broadening their range of skills and experience in the team, as well as increasing language and cultural awareness. This will also give them access to larger and more varied candidate pools – which your stakeholders / clients will appreciate and, in some cases, even ask for.
7. Build and maintain your talent pool
In today’s executive search scenario with various advanced technologies, consultants need to stay ahead and up to date. It’s a candidate driven market now and to win in the battle of acquiring the best talents, headhunters need to keep up with the modern talent acquisition methods. They need to be proactive and build a relationship with the potential candidates even before they are ready to join a recruitment process or before a client assignment is confirmed. For securing high-quality potential key players and game changers for your client’s job openings, building and maintaining a talent pool is a great way. Qualitative and structured networking is key to success.
Keep your eyes open for new trends and new solutions – be prepared and unlock the potential for exceptional things to happen!