FAQ for Employers

ART FAQ

Does the name "Atlantic" mean that you can only recruit near the Atlantic coast?

ART was originally founded in New York in 1987, and the Atlantic Ocean was visible from our office windows. That view helped inspire us to do what, at the time, few recruitment firms dared to do: to look beyond a little island and to recruit everywhere on the planet!

Even today, most recruitment firms only know companies or candidates in their immediate locality, while the global economy and 21st Century's technological realities demand that business and careers understand and take advantage of opportunities in larger, more complex and interconnected markets.

Companies and candidates need recruiters who understand both the local and the global business world. That's where ART comes in!

ART today recruits on 6 continents, in over 100 countries, in 1,500 cities, as a "virtually local" executive search firm. This means that we are always focusing on recruiting candidates who are already in the locations where you need them to be, but if you need to choose candidates from a larger regional or worldwide database, ART can easily provide such options. Our recruitment evaluation processes are exactly the same for all locations. Some sample searches that we have worked on are posted on our website: CLICK.

Seriously, though, why the name "Atlantic Research Technologies" for a firm that does executive search recruitment?

ART was initially founded to recruit in the research and engineering technology sector, and at the time we wanted to highlight that aspect. Since our founding, ART has massively expanded beyond the recruitment of engineers and scientists, but we like the ART name because it reminds us to keep an eye on new industries, on growing regions and on exciting new fields.

By the way, some of the most "well known" firms purportedly engaging in executive search, along with tiny firms, often use the stereotypical and boring hyphenation of their founders' names. But does a recruitment company named something like "Hamilton-Burr Group" really convey any relevance to the practice of executive search? Or is it just sort of a pretentious and a stale carryover from the 1960's, like their stereotypical executive search websites that invariably fill their pages with photos of actors portraying serious-looking business people shaking hands and looking really, really, serious? A bit of history here: when those firms were founded, the existing recruitment methodology was then the lowly and often disreputable "employment agency." But "employment agency" in the name of their firm did not sound very good when they were seeking clients to offer retainer-focused "executive search services," so those firms instead decided to use hyphenated names for their firms, copying the already stereotypical naming protocol of law firms, which, not coincidentally, often featured retainer-focused fees.

But in the end, what matters is not the name of a recruitment firm, but its results for an employer regarding their specific search. There's an apt Italian phrase: "Provare per Credere" - which in English might be translated as "Seeing is Believing." If we were to change the name of "Atlantic Research Technologies," maybe we might use "Provere per Credere" as our name -- PPC for short.

What services does ART offer?

ART does only one thing, and we do it very well: executive search by humans and the recruitment of great human candidates. The high-value candidates whom we refer to our client-companies help build our client-companies and advance their business mission. At the end of our client's hiring process, we also are available, if asked, to assist with the firm's reference checking of our candidate.

Things that we do not do:

Payroll Services (Employer of Record, Agent of Record)
Outplacement services
Visa and Immigration services
Legal services
Background checks, Drug testing, fingerprinting, foot-printing, retina-scanning, dreams harvesting, etc.
Luck-based Job advertisements, "lead generation," mass-mailing of resumes/CV's, spamming of candidates or employers
Psychometric tests, handwriting analysis, phrenology, palm-readings, or similar 19th Century parlour tricks and voodoo masquerading as science.

If ART is conducting executive search remotely from the U.S., is this activity authorized in the country where our company would need ART need to recruit and place a person?

The short answer is: Yes, absolutely yes! So shall we get started on your company's international search?

In most countries in the world, the rules regarding ART and other executive search firms operating from abroad differ from regulations regarding domestic recruitment firms. Most regulations specifically focus on employment agencies that recruit, hire and often are involved in the visa and immigration and payroll aspects of the candidate. ART is not involved in any of those matters beyond recruiting managerial and executive level candidates in the target country (typically local nationals) and referring them to our client-companies.

In the matter of cross-border business consulting, including executive search advisory, this activity is permitted under the laws of the signatories to WTO GATS commitments, without local registration. Global executive search firms often handle similar remote referrals for roles without issues.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) consists of 166 members as of late 2024, representing 98% of global trade. Members include sovereign nations, the European Union, and distinct customs territories like Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. The body regulates international trade, with over 20 nations currently in negotiations to join. More: https://www.wto.org

Does Atlantic Research Technologies recruit in my industry sector?

ART recruits, and has recruited, in hundreds of industry sectors since our founding in 1987. Some general categories of industry and service sectors in which we recruit are described in our Sector pages. For more details, please click on the Sector below that is most relevant to you. Please note that the order of placement of these categories in this chart is entirely arbitrary. Each Sector is equally important to our recruitment activities.

Our Recruitment Practices
SEMICONDUCTORS & ELECTRONICS	INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTS & EQUIPMENT	CONSUMER PRODUCTS & SERVICES
AUTOMOTIVE & TRANSPORT	AEROSPACE & AVIATION	MEDICAL & HEALTH TECHNOLOGY
ENERGY & POWER GENERATION	CHEMICALS & ADVANCED MATERIALS	AGRIBUSINESS
IT & NETWORK SERVICES	ENGINEERING SERVICES (EPC)	LOGISTICS & SUPPLY CHAIN SERVICES
FINANCIAL SERVICES	BUSINESS SERVICES (B2B)	NON-PROFIT

I see that ART recruits worldwide, but I really need a recruitment firm that recruits in the United States. Do you do executive searches in the US?

Of course! We recruit all over the United States! ART has been recruiting for positions all across America since our founding in 1987. We are based in the United States, and our recruiters are Americans with decades of experience recruiting not only internationally, but also in the USA.

When we say that we recruit globally, we're including the United States. And we recruit in all 50 states with equal comfort, in every metropolitan area. This expertise comes from decades of hard work, decades of learning companies and industries, and the key players in them. It even involves understanding things that are important to candidates in their lives, like relative housing costs and commuting time.

And we understand that America is a big place where there is no single national mindset regarding business culture. Understanding regional differences and preferences, regional styles of communicating, and other human-to-human relations factors, can be very important in finding the right person for the right position.

Too often recruiters think of themselves as princes and princesses over little feudal territories where they alone claim to "know everyone," simply because they are located in a place, and they often misguide their clients with such a narrow view of business. Moreover, one's zip code simply does not confer professional competence of any kind in 21st Century executive search and recruitment.

Being located in Detroit does not mean that you automatically know how to design cars, and being in Silicon Valley does not automatically make you a semiconductor industry specialist. Similarly, a recruiter being located in a particular location does not automatically mean that they know how to recruit properly in that location.

Our challenge is simple: the only way to properly judge a recruitment firm's effectiveness is by the quality of the candidates that are presented for a specific client need.

We view the world as being "local" and "global." Why is this conception very useful to your firm, even if you only have needs in the United States?

If you are a US firm seeking a manager in Atlanta, for example, and you do not wish to relocate candidates, is an American recruitment firm in your industry that only has great candidates in Chicago an acceptable recruiter for you? No. It doesn't matter that they recruit someplace else in America. It matters if they have candidates or know how to find candidates where you need them to be. That's ART.

If you are an employer based in Orange County, California and this week you need managers in Phoenix and Minneapolis and Dallas and Cleveland, should you then have to track down recruiters in all those cities in order to find good candidates? And what if next month you need people in San Antonio, Houston, Denver, Boston, Philadelphia, Rochester, Indianapolis, Nashville, Raleigh, Seattle, San Francisco, and San Diego? Have to find a dozen more recruiters still? And then have to explain again and again what your company does and what you need in an employee? No, you need a recruitment firm that recruits everywhere. We call this "worldwide," but if you prefer to call it "everywhere in the United States," that's OK with us.

Our long experience recruiting nationally in the United States means that we not only understand where the right candidates are currently located, but also we may know of candidates in other areas who might be easily relocatable as well.

Our recruitment reach and experience in the USA is deep. One of our specialties in the United States national market is a great ability to find great candidates for smaller localities where there simply might not be any really useful local recruiters. Or maybe local recruiters are only useful for certain types of jobs. If a company in a smaller local market needs a special kind of manager and they need to find the best possible candidates from outside their town, ART is especially able to find the right fit.

Our focus is always on finding the best qualified candidates who are local to the site where our client needs them, but because we recruit everywhere, we can easily expand a search within a state or regionally or nationally if necessary.

What fields does ART recruit in?

ART has a broad candidate base of talented senior and middle management executive candidates from the high tech, industrial and service sectors. Most of our candidates could be found in the following general categories:

General Management (CEO, President, General Manager, Managing Director, etc.)
Finance (CFO, VP Finance, Director of Finance, Controller, Finance Manager, etc.)
Sales, Marketing, Business Development (VP, Director, Country Managers, Sales Directors, Sales Managers, etc.)
Supply Chain (Sourcing/ Procurement/ Purchasing, Materials, Distribution/ Logistics/ Fulfillment, etc.)
Manufacturing (COO, VP Operations, Plant Manager, Director of Manufacturing, etc.)
Information Technology (CTO, CISO, CIO, VP, and Director levels)
R&D and Engineering (CTO, VP, and Director levels)
Human Resources (VP, Director and Manager levels)
Legal (Corporate Roles and Local Business Unit Roles - only for Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa, Mideast)

In what circumstances should I use ART, and when should I not use ART for my firm's recruitment need?


Your Company's Plan for this Recruitment	Use ART	Don't Use ART
You need ART to find good candidates for a key position and you want ART to successfully place a good candidate with you for this position. (We can only work at our best when our client wants us to "win!")	X

You have traditionally used competent professional executive search firms to fill key positions. (We can probably do a better job than those firms that you have worked with in the past, and likely at lower overall cost and with the least risk. Our firm has a long reputation, and we have been interviewed by the leading business and technology press of 3 continents, as testament of that great reputation.)	X

This is a confidential search and you need to replace a current person with a better candidate, who needs to be professionally headhunted. (Confidential search is one of our specialties.)	X

The agencies that you have long used for recruitment do not have suitable contacts in the location, industry or discipline that you require for this post. (The advantage of working with ART is that we recruit everywhere, in hundreds of industry categories, and in virtually all managerial disciplines. We know "where the pieces fit," so when we do an executive search, we typically bring an advanced and broader level of experience and contacts to assist our clients, wherever they need a candidate to be.)	X

The position is in a country or region other than your own, so you need competent recruiters whom you can entrust to identify key candidates. These recruiters need to be properly trained and experienced in executive search, candidate identification and evaluation, not simply people who place ads and wait passively for candidate resumes to forward to you. You need recruiters who also understand both your business culture as well as that of the target region, so that they can properly identify candidates whose business style fits your firm. You are concerned about the quality of service of recruitment firms in the target region and you need recruiters who understand that your firm wants to hire a key person for a long term and very important role with your firm. (ART understands most all world and regional business cultures, as well as business cultures that are typical of a particular industry sector. When evaluating candidates for your search, your ART recruiter would understand what you expect and s/he would look for people whose personal best is working in a company such as yours! Because only very experienced recruiters are assigned to our clients' searches, they should be expected to be at the same level of professional competence as recruiters in your country - or much better.)	X

You have been using another recruitment firm on this project and they have failed to find adequate candidates. (ART's 40 year history is largely a story of new companies coming to us following failed search attempts and being happily pleased by the quality of our executive search services.)	X

Your firm rarely has had a good experience with agency candidates, but your current need requires the "right candidate." (A high percentage of our clients are companies that came to us after a failed recruitment effort by another search firm, or a long history of working with poor quality recruitment firms. Our successful placements often convert anti-agency employers into long-term sources of repeat business. We welcome the challenge to help good companies that have never experienced ART's quality of service!)	X

You have had bad experiences with retainer-focused search firms, whose focus is always on guaranteeing their high cost payment rather than focusing on candidate excellence, so now you want to use a results-only search firm. (We are confident that our executive search work exceeds that of all other recruitment firms, no matter their location or payment structure or public relations expenditures. The ART key factor is the experience and accountability of the ART recruiter working for our client. S/he would have a minimum of ten years' experience in high level executive search. We never outsource any search, and we do not "pass the buck" between offices or departments when doing a client search. The result is clear and constant feedback to and from clients and candidates, allowing for rapid adjustments in the search parameters if needed, as well as a good "meeting of the minds" between employer and candidate.)	X

Your firm has made an offer to a candidate, but you are not sure that the person will accept, so you want to use agency candidates "as an insurance policy." (We are an executive search firm, not a provider of candidates whose chances of being hired are near zero. Our candidates are carefully headhunted by our recruiters; they are not waiting to be called for any interview. Please do not use us for this kind of plan, as you might give otherwise very good candidates a bad sense of your company's motives in interviewing them, and that feeling might potentially negatively affect your firm's reputation in your industry or location.)		X

Your firm is strongly considering a tolerably acceptable outside candidate, or an internal candidate, or the referral of a candidate from a current employee, but you want other choices, believing that maybe a better candidate might appear. (We are hired to find the best possible candidates for our clients, but if the reality is that your firm has largely decided on offering the position to an existing candidate, then we would recommend that you make the offer to that person. It is important for our recruiters and our candidates that our client-companies are committed and serious about hiring ART's great candidates.)		X

Your firm is now advertising for the position or you plan to use job ads, perhaps in conjunction with using contingency recruitment agencies. You would look to ART to provide you with a few other candidates, so that you could have the broadest range of candidates to compare with the ad-response candidates. (We feel that if the client believes that ad-response candidates, including candidates identified by low-experienced offshore recruiters, are "good enough" resources for that vacancy, then we are not right for that vacancy. You are the best decider on this point, and we respect your choice. However, ART is best used for mission-critical searches that require solid executive search headhunting, which has nothing to do with luck-based ad-response style recruitment. We expect that our candidates would be better than ad-response candidates, but if the employer thinks that ad-response candidates might be "adequate enough" for a particular vacancy, then our recruiters' experience and efforts, as well as our candidates' sincere interest in that employer would have been wasted.)		X

You are under tremendous pressure from the hiring manager to identify strong candidates, but your firm's management has told you that your own role in the firm heavily depends upon your not using recruitment companies, even if agency candidates might be better than ad-response candidates. You decide to try presenting strong agency candidates in the hope that management might see the value of opening the search to superior candidates who have been professionally sought out, identified and evaluated. (Unfortunately, while we commiserate with your situation, it is almost never good for our recruiters or our candidates to be involved with "penny-wise pound-foolish" employers. Normally the overall value of our placed candidates in their role at our client company is extraordinarily higher than the cost of our candidate's salary plus our fees, but if an employer cannot do that mathematical calculation when hiring a key person, we ought not be considered for the search.)		X

You need ART to find good managerial candidates in a foreign country for a key country- or regional-manager position, as well as to "take care" of a hired candidate's payroll, pension, benefits, tax obligations, etc. You have no legal entity in the country and you probably do not plan to have one. To fill the gap, you are seeking a "full service recruitment firm" or a "simple one-stop solution" that essentially provides recruitment and all legal, payroll and HR support for a single monthly service fee. (ART proudly only does executive search, but we often can help companies find good foreign candidates, even if our client does not have a legal entity in country. If the jurisdiction permits a third party to be the official employer of record for a person who actually works on your behalf, ART might be able to identify competent third party service firms to handle your firm's local HR and payroll requirements. In some jurisdictions it is perfectly legal, socially acceptable, and easy for a person to establish oneself as a business entity, which could directly accept payments and also forward tax and other payments to government entities. We have assisted companies and candidates with this alternative, whenever possible. But a payroll company or an outsourced recruitment firm that claims that it can serve as the legal employer of your employee is almost always absolutely not experienced in proper executive search. Moreover, the legality of such relationships can vary, depending upon the jurisdiction. Often the lowliest, most deceptive, firms describe themselves as "full service recruiters," when in fact they are typically incapable of performing any proper recruitment for the key needs of international firms, and that deception should serve as a warning about their other services. It is possible for example, for a local payroll company or employment agency to place jobs ads, send you resumes of local candidates, and then put your hired candidate on their payroll (which your firm would reimburse). But please be aware that employment agencies of this type, even if they claim to be doing "executive search," are most typically not doing executive search. Think of an employment agency as being to an executive search firm what a house-painter is to a portrait artist or what a barber is to a surgeon. Only somewhat related fields, but actually quite distinct in training and function. It takes years and years for a firm or recruiter to understand executive search properly. One's location is not the deciding factor, it is the time devoted to learning the profession that trains one. If your firm's key business mission depends on a foreign employment agency mostly because they'll "take care of it all," then you could be putting your firm's business mission at risk. You are really hiring an outsourced payroll company to identify a person who might be responsible for your firm's revenue or success in that region. If that level of service sounds adequate for your needs, then that may be the right choice. And if that firm's role is to be specifically limited to payroll matters alone, that might work out for your firm. But ART should only be hired if there is a great need by a company to find a highly qualified key person through the efforts of trained professional executive search headhunters.)	?	?

I work at another executive search firm that would like to work with ART, either by presenting my candidates to you or with your firm finding candidates for my client searches. How do I contact you?

If you are a recruitment firm that would like to present candidates to us, we cannot help you. For one thing, it is very likely that "your" candidate is also already "our" candidate. ART does not outsource our recruitment process to any other company for any reason. This is to ensure the quality and ethics of the search according to our standards, because we strongly value the careers of our candidates as well as the quality of our work.

However, if your firm has a reputable history and if you have a very difficult search assignment and believe that our experience and candidates might be helpful in filling your client's search assignment, we are willing to discuss a relationship.