Three Ways a Great Executive Recruiting Firm Contributes to the Hiring Process

Hiring STAR talent for executive, managerial, and C-level positions is an investment in a business’s future that will always pay off—with the right candidate. One of the best ways to identify that talent is with an insightful, results-focused interview and hiring process run by an experienced team. The best way to manage that process is to partner with a boutique executive recruiting firm with industry specialization. So if you’re hiring an executive for your ecommerce organization, for example, you should partner with a firm with ecommerce recruiters to snag the ideal candidate.

Here are three ways the best recruiting firms will create a smooth, successful hiring process.

Planning the Interview Questions

The best executive recruiting firm for your business will know your business—the industry that your company lives and breathes every day. Your recruiting partner should live and breathe it too. There are interview questions in particular that a truly experienced recruitment team can assist with: questions which reveal practical performance indicators, those which are specific to the position itself, and questions around assessing the cultural fit of the candidate.

The right interview questions require industry-specific knowledge, but also the expertise of a recruitment specialist. Skilled executive recruiters know how to formulate questions that strike at the heart of the needs, pain points, and requirements common to executive positions. Industry specialists combine that recruiting knowledge with a significant understanding of the particular job descriptions and requirements of a job specialization, such as consumer insights, ecommerce, or digital sales and marketing.

Coaching and Working with the Interviewers

Beyond an executive recruiting firm devising a strategy for developing insightful questions to assess skill sets and accomplishments, their input on the interview process can prove invaluable. For instance, they’re great at mitigating interviewer bias. It’s natural for internal executives to possess certain biases about what sorts of candidates they feel are ideal for a position. While they certainly possess excellent insight, without thorough recruiting training, these biases can result in hiring the wrong candidate—especially if you’re hiring for a new role that hasn’t existed in the company before.

If you’re starting a brand-new analytics department, for example, there may not be enough internal knowledge about data science to make a fully informed choice. A data science and analytic recruiting team that’s accustomed to placing analytic professionals can coach interviewers to resist indulging in that sort of bias while focusing on industry-specific interview strategies.

Relaying Feedback From Candidates

The frequency and quality of communication between employers and candidates can make or break an application process. Breakdown in communication are rarely a result of bad faith but could be due to genuine misunderstandings. They could be misunderstandings during the hiring process, or of the position and its responsibilities, or assumptions about knowledge that one side considers common, or given. An executive recruiter acting as an informed, experienced liaison supports the best interests of the employer and the candidate and is an irreplaceable asset during the whole process.