| Need
A Good Executive Search Firm? |
| White
Papers |
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|
"The
Strategic Imperative of Partnering with
Atlantic Research Technologies for Executive
Leadership Acquisition" - Gemini
|
.pdf |
|
Gemini's
Report on ART Worldwide
|
.pdf |
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Gemini's
Report on ART's USA Recruitment
|
.pdf |
|
Grok's
"Thorough Review of Atlantic Research
Technologies (ART)"
|
.pdf |
|
Grok's
Report on ART's USA Recruitment
|
.pdf |
|
|
.pdf |
|
|
.pdf |
|
Gemini's
Review of ART's Blog
|
.pdf |
|
|
Audio
Podcasts
|
|
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Gemini's
Audio Podcast: "Decoding Top Talent
Inside Atlantic Research Technologies"
|
.mp3 |
|
Gemini's
Audio Podcast: "ART's High Precision
Headhunting Model"
|
.mp3 |
|
Gemini's
Audio Podcast: "The Human Art of
Headhunting"
|
.mp3 |
Founded
in 1987, ART is an American executive search
firm that uses "best in class" methods to
identify the best available candidates for our
client companies' senior- and middle-management
executive searches worldwide. Roles might be key
sole-contributors or managers over large
organizations.
What
differentiates ART from other recruitment firms?
The ART Simple Business Equation for Success:
Targeted
executive search done by well trained, experienced
professional human recruiters
+ low, results-only
flat fees (never fees arbitrarily based on % of
candidate salary)
+ strong 100%
money-back guarantee for 90-180 days after
start-date
=
repeat business from our clients, whose success depends
upon our great candidates
The
ART Simple Model of Executive Search has
allowed our firm since 1987...
- to expand globally into the leading 1,500
metro-areas on six continents;
- to gain subtle understanding of dozens of job
categories & their relationship to successful
business models;
- to develop recruitment expertise in dozens of
complex industries, including contacts with a
sector's top candidates
Success comes to the ART Executive Search Model
by understanding the intersection of...
- a unique company's unique business model and
unique business goal with
- a unique person's unique career experience,
unique style and unique career goals.
How
Should An Executive Search (Headhunting) Firm
Serve Your Company?
1.
ART
relies entirely on headhunting.
Headhunting
is a time-tested executive search process also called
"the direct approach method." In this way, candidates,
often recruited at the client's competitors or
near-competitors, are given priority in the candidate
identification and selection process as being the
closest fits and least risky candidate choices for the
client search.
Of
course, other candidates may also be considered, and in
some cases it is even preferable for a company to
consider different candidate experiences. Because your
ART recruiter is very experienced, s/he will know where
to look for candidates, and s/he will understand what
candidates would be best for a client's business goals
and business model.
2.
ART has never used advertising to source
candidates.
***tldr:
Recruitment firms that rely on advertising to find
candidates are not headhunters (even if they
call themselves headhunters) and they are not doing
executive search (even if they describe their
activity as executive search)!
Of
course it makes good sense for an employer to place
advertisements for most of their company's vacancies,
but in special cases when true executive search
(headhunting) is needed to find a very special kind of
person for a very special kind of business mission, then
professional headhunters can bring an employer great
value. The ART recruiter assigned to your firm's search
will have a minimum of 10 years' experience in proper
executive search.
Outside
recruitment agencies that merely place jobs ads and then
wait for some barely acceptable candidates to appear,
are generally a waste of time and money, and they can
create risk due to their incapacity in executive search
recruitment, in terms of presenting the "wrong"
candidates for the "wrong" job. Sometimes they market
their services to a Human Resources department like
this: "We'll place the ads for you; we'll receive a
1,000 resumes; the candidates won't bother you about
follow-up; and then we'll sort the resumes and only send
you the best resumes." That kind of service comes from
an agency that has no useful candidates, and no useful
capabilities or useful contacts to conduct a headhunting
assignment. Their method has nothing to do with
executive search, and it has no particular regard for
either the long term needs of the candidate or the
employer. It's just saying that they know how to place
an advertisement that will get an absurd number of
responses.
A
recruitment agency's reliance on advertisements is an
admission that they do not have useful candidates or
useful industry contacts at the start of the client's
search. What then is their actual value to an employer?
An untrained recruiter is rather a costly, time-wasting,
risk to the employer's business mission, which depends
upon filling the role with the best possible candidate
available. A recruiter who relies on advertising is a
person who has not been properly trained as to where to
find good candidates or how to properly understand what
is good for the candidates' careers, so that recruiter's
advice and judgment is of negligible value to both the
candidate and the employer.
Our client-companies do not hire us to be lucky!
- Our clients hire us because we are professional
headhunters trained to seek out, evaluate, and
present the best possible candidates for our
clients' most important business missions for which
failure is not an option.
3.
We are in continuous operation,
24/7/365.
Our
clients' business cannot stop because a recruiter is
asleep or on vacation. ART recruits everywhere, so
this means that when other recruitment firms are
working, we are working. When they are lunching, we
are working. When they are sleeping, we are working.
Not only does our model of efficiency help us finish
searches faster, it also allows us to compete
effectively in all world time zones.
Employers
working with ART never feel that there is a time zone
lag when working with an ART recruiter. Ordinarily,
working with ART should feel as easy as working with a
local recruiter in one's own city. This kind of rapid
response and immediacy is critical in order for search
parameters to be continuously fine-tuned between the
employer and the ART recruiter. There is never a sense
of "buck passing" or gridlock when working with ART,
because for us, time wasted is simply not acceptable.
4.
The recruitment breadth and depth of ART is
such that we can quickly understand a
client's vacancy, market, industry or
region, so an employer does not need to
waste time explaining things to an ART
recruiter.
We
recruit in dozens of industries, in over 1,500 metro
areas on six continents, while most other recruitment
firms recruit only in narrow industry sectors, often
only in their own locality.
We
recruit in the general management, sales, marketing,
business development, finance, supply chain,
manufacturing operations, engineering, IT, human
resources and legal disciplines - the key departments
upon which a company's success depends. Most other
recruitment firms only have sufficient experience in
one or in just a few of these disciplines.
Simply
put, with nearly 40 years' experience recruiting in
our clients' markets and candidates' fields - and
everywhere in between - "we know where all the pieces
fit" between a company's departments, so we can call
upon our deep knowledge and resources to find just the
right kind of skills that your firm needs to fulfill
its key business mission.
We
might well have already recruited for your firm's
direct competitors, as well as for your suppliers and
customers. And if the search is an international one,
ART is one of the best experienced search firms to
understand the subtleties of different national
business cultures. We can be helpful in making your
firm's executive search less of a high-risk mystery
tour and more of a normal meeting of like-minded
people from your industry who can help take your firm
to a higher level.
5.
ART never outsources any search to other
recruitment firms.
By doing our clients'
searches entirely ourselves, we are able to control the
quality, confidentiality, and timelines of the search.
At ART, all activity and
industry knowledge is centralized, for efficiency and
for the creation of a finer and longer lasting
placement.
Often
when a recruitment firm cannot do a search themselves,
rather than being honest with the employer, they will
brag about "their network," "their partners," or speak
of "multiple offices" scattered around a target
geography, as some kind of proof of their capability to
serve the employer properly. Often they will require
retainers to start the search and a second guaranteed
fee to present a "short list" of candidates who have
been identified by their "partners."
But
here's the dysfunctional problem with the outsourced or
inter-office recruitment model:
(1)
they do not have candidates or useful industry contacts
themselves, even though they describe themselves as
experts in that sector or market or discipline, in order
to gain an employer's trust and advanced payment;
(2)
they do not know where to find candidates; and
(3)
the only way that to offer any candidates is to
outsource your key search to either another office or to
strangers.
Their
method then is kind of like this: you have an ailment,
so you go to your doctor. Your doctor listens to you
talking about your symptoms, but that doctor says that
s/he would not be treating you. Instead, that doctor
brags about there being many other doctors in "the
network" who would be called in to treat you, although
you won't actually ever meet them until you are under
anesthesia on the operating table. You don't get to know
the qualifications or experiences of the others in "the
network," but "that's OK, don't worry," assures your
doctor. And after this chat, you can now go to the
reception desk to pre-pay your surgery, knowing that you
will be well cared for by "the network."
What
are the consequences of an outsourced model of
recruitment?
- MISUNDERSTANDINGS ABOUT THE REQUIREMENTS AND
DELAYS. At best, the person with whom you
are talking (and pre-paying?), might understand a
very different idea about what constitutes a good
candidate-client match compared to what the
recruiter who would actually be identifying
candidates might imagine. So the distant
outsourced recruiter might offer to your contact
person candidates who are not fits, and the search
might need to be delayed and restarted or
candidates might be wrongly considered or hired.
By contrast, the
ART recruiter assigned to your search, and with whom
you would communicate initially, would be the same
person doing your search, evaluating candidates and
presenting candidates to you personally. S/he would be
hearing your feedback and the candidate's feedback
throughout the hiring process. No information loss!
- FATAL MISJUDGMENTS ABOUT CANDIDATE
QUALIFICATIONS. Problems of this type could
especially be greatly amplified if there is an
international component to the search, because
outsourced recruitment agencies in other countries
might have quite different assumptions and
evaluation methods regarding local candidates who
would work for foreign employers. For example, for
an employer requiring a fluent English candidate,
a recruiter in the foreign country might judge
English skills on test scores alone or might say,
"Well, s/he knows English better than I, so that's
'English fluency.'"
In
this case, an ART recruiter would not be only looking
for good English communication skills, but the ART
recruiter would also be looking for the foreign
candidate to think bilingually. Foreign accents are OK,
and language errors are usually excusable, but what
cannot be lost is an ability by the foreign candidate to
fundamentally understand the mindset and business
culture of the distant employer.
- POOR TRAINING OF THE OUTSOURCING PARTNER.
The training of outsourced recruiters and their
agency's ethics might not be at all what one
should expect. In many countries, the people doing
recruitment (ie., placing advertisements and
passively waiting for resumes to appear) are
poorly trained and poorly paid. Their managers
themselves might not have worked in recruitment
very long. They could be a "recruiter" one day and
be a "customer service rep." the next day at a
hotel or phone company. That is the reality for
many - recruitment is just a job or gig, not a
profession. That's why they may think that placing
jobs advertisements is recruitment or "executive
search." Anyone can upload job ads, but it takes
years to learn executive search properly.
ART recruiters always
will have at a minimum of 10 years' proven
experience in executive search, typically with
proven successful recruitment in the client's industry
or target region. Simply being located in a country or
city does not automatically make one an executive
search headhunter who has learned how to find
candidates or how to evaluate candidates' experiences
and suitability.
- POSSIBILITY OF POOR ETHICS BY THE OUTSOURCED
PARTNER AND THE IDENTIFICATION OF CANDIDATES
BASED ON CRITERIA UNRELATED TO COMPETENCE OR
CANDIDATE TRACK RECORD. Moreover, in some
underdeveloped countries, recruiters often
approach a candidate saying, "I have a great job
for you, and if you pay me, I will make sure that
you are presented for this job." In other cases,
friends or family members are promoted to the
employer, without the employer being told that
possibly better candidates were available. In
other cases, candidates might not be presented due
to racial, ethnic, religious, age or gender
discrimination.
In stark contrast,
ART has never asked any candidate for a fee. All of
our work is employer-paid. We consider recruiters that
extort money from prospective candidates in order to
be considered for a job or who promote friends or
family members ahead of better qualified candidates to
be unethical criminals, and we never would "partner
with" or outsource any search work to such companies.
We do not tolerate discrimination in hiring in any
country for any job for any reason.
- THE FINANCIAL MODEL OF RECRUITERS WHO
OUTSOURCE DOES NOT NECESSARILY BENEFIT AN
EMPLOYER. In most cases involving split-fee
or outsourced recruitment scenarios, the "partner
firm" simply will not do any work unless the
originating agency guarantees to pay them in
advance. Moreover, typically agencies will always
prioritize their own immediate searches over
inter-office or other split-fee arrangements, if
only because their own cases are full-fee cases.
Did the recruiter whom you spoke with forget to
mention this when s/he spoke of "their network?"
No mention of delays that might occur in your
search due to your search being a lower priority
for the party that really would be doing your
recruitment?
Doesn't this "split-fee
multi-agency" or "outsourced recruiting partner"
method for doing your company's key executive search
sound flawed for your firm's important and pressing
needs? Doesn't it sound like a methodology of
recruitment that mostly exists to guarantee maximizing
payment to a recruitment agency and their unknown
partners, rather than to identify the best candidates
to better your company?
And
what happens when your company signs a contract with
some recruitment agency that admittedly cannot do the
search themselves - often because it's an international
search - but then they must scramble to find some
recruiters (any recruiters) somewhere that might
actually be able to do your search? What a mess! This is
how a proper search that might have taken 2-3 weeks ends
up taking six months....
By
contrast, when you work with ART, the recruiter
assigned to your case will be the person whom you will
speak to throughout your search, and s/he will be
personally seeking out, identifying, and evaluating your
candidates for mutual suitability.
After
candidate presentation, during your hiring process, your
ART recruiter will be personally channeling feedback
with you and with any of the candidates being
considered, with the objective of minimizing
misunderstandings, clarifying issues for both sides, and
finding the right person for your firm's key search.
By
the way, it is ART policy that when a search inquiry
comes to us, at the start we estimate our likelihood of
our being successful, and if we do not believe that
there is at least a 75% chance that we could find the
right person for that client, we will not accept the
search. So whenever we do take on a new case, we
consider that search is a priority search!