While Amazon, Google, Facebook are using their economies of scale to drive out competition in their respective industries, boutique search firms are wondering, “Are we next?” Never fear! Talent acquisition, including recruiting and candidate sourcing, is an industry where the smaller, specialized players can continue to thrive.
Large executive recruiting firms wield huge amounts of resources in the form of labor, data, tools, and networks, while boutique search firms create a niche that will allow them to survive. With lower overhead and often better customer service, these boutique firms can add just a few tools to their belt to ensure continued success. Often, boutique firms don’t have the staffing bandwidth to take on multiple searches at a time, and likewise, they may not have the capital needed to invest in the newest tech tools to make these searches more efficient and effective.
@IQTalent says that with the help of #Outsourced #CandidateResearch, specialized boutique search firms can find better talent and connect better with potential candidates:Click to TweetIf this sounds like your situation, augmenting your team with a strong research platform and creating a partnership with an outsourced research firm may alleviate the challenges that come with building a successful and robust operation for any boutique search firm.
Check out these 8 ways a specialized research team can benefit boutique search firms:
1. Save Time Identifying Talent
Generally, boutique search firms find their niche by recruiting for a very specific job or industry vertical. This market is usually either highly competitive, limited in talent, or both. The boutique firm is expected to handle the recruiting needs that an internal team could not.
This job requires many hours in candidate research and identification. Tough-to-fill roles need a strong pipeline of passive candidates for success, as the inflow of qualified talent via active applicants will not be very high. Particularly if your client is unknown and does not have the name to draw interest on their own, a listing on Indeed will not generate enough candidates for a robust search.
The amount of time to research and identify an acceptable number of passive candidates can be taxing, especially if you are not very strong in certain recruiting skills such as Boolean Search, or if your firm doesn’t have access to various sourcing tools and technology.
By partnering with a candidate research firm, you can eliminate extensive labor hours and budget used building a pipeline of passive candidates. What would take weeks or months on your own can be reduced to 3-5 days, and the candidates might even be of higher quality.
2. Find Reliable Contact Information
You can’t build a pipeline if you can’t contact your candidates! While tools like LinkedIn and other networking sites can be a good way to find good talent, they don’t always provide many ways to contact candidates.
A specialized research firm can navigate this issue. You don’t want to give up on candidates who don’t have a LinkedIn profile or who don’t regularly access LinkedIn, or those who don’t provide an easily accessible email or phone number. A research platform can provide multiple points of contact, from personal emails, work emails, phone numbers, personal githubs, design portfolios, and more.
Whether it’s following up on initial LinkedIn messages/requests that were unresponsive or sending out a mail merge to a large number of candidates at once, having a research firm who provides at least one, if not multiple, points of contact for your identified candidates will maximize your research and outreach efforts without increasing your valuable work hours.
3. Tackle Tougher Roles
Filling tougher roles can result in increased trust and rapport with your client (along with bigger paychecks!). However, the tougher the role is, the more resources are needed to make the hire, including hours of research, sourcing, and possibly navigating the changing scope of the role from the hiring team. Internal recruiting teams choose to outsource these roles to boutique search firms to mitigate the challenges. Still, even the most specialized search firm may not be able to easily navigate it alone.
A strong research firm or platform specializing in finding niche talent efficiently and thoroughly can make sure no stone is unturned and offer strong analytics and data regarding the talent market. A research partner will help you avoid the stress of consistently reaching a dead-end, and more importantly, find qualified passive talent you may have never found with your own resources.
Check out what 8 benefits specialized boutique search firms will see when they embrace the support of #Outsourced #CandidateResearch! Read more on the @IQTalent blog:Click to Tweet4. Build Robust Pipelines
Each person that is submitted into the recruiting pipeline can take hours of work to find, research, and qualify as a candidate. Many qualified candidates may not respond to your outreach, and others who are either not qualified once you speak with them on the phone or who find they are not interested after learning more about the role. To create a strong and vibrant pipeline, you will need a significant number of sourced passive candidates. It can take weeks, months, and sometimes longer to identify enough candidates to unearth the right fit.
A strong research firm can expedite this process immensely. Not every candidate will be perfect, even if they appear so on paper. Some will not be interested in leaving their current role, and some may just not be interested in the line of work. To combat these challenges, you need a sizeable, curated list loaded with top talent from the beginning.
By quickly producing a list of qualified passive candidates in as little as 3-5 days, you can build a robust pipeline more quickly, which in most cases can lead to faster and more fills for your team.
5. Get Access To A Larger Amount Of Talent
Sourcing tools can be expensive. There are tons of job boards that are free, but if you are in a boutique search firm, many of these will not be fruitful. The cost of a single seat for a great tool like LinkedIn Recruiter can be thousands of dollars a month!
A great candidate research partner will have access to a large quantity of the best tools on the market. Being able to leverage the power of AI in tools such as Seekout, Hiretual, Eightfold, and others, combined with extensive research training in Boolean, Xray searching, and more, a research partner can maximize the amount of talent identified. With a platform like IQTalent Xchange, no candidate will be added to your pipeline without a trained professional’s eyes viewing their information and validating their rank on your list.
Relying solely on AI can be tricky and rarely effective on its own. Likewise, relying solely on human efforts can be costly and time-consuming. Finding a research firm that can leverage both will make sure that more candidates will be seen and provided to you in a quick and timely manner.
6. Handle A Larger Req Load
If your firm provides full-cycle recruitment to your clients, the amount of time dedicated to just one single role can be enormous! From phone screens to follow-ups, scheduling onsite visits, and prepping candidates for the process, negotiations, and more, non-recruiters don’t always understand the amount of time it takes to fill just one role.
Before the above process even begins, what about the time and effort it takes to identify candidates and get them to talk to you? Often, this identification and outreach will be the most time-consuming part of the full-cycle recruiting process.
A research firm can take this laborious challenge off your plate. With the time and effort you save on candidate sourcing, you can increase the number of roles you can manage at one time, leading to more hires and, of course, more income.
7. Improved ROI
A strong research partner or candidate sourcing platform can improve your time to fill, creating a more efficient and effective process, which results in increased revenue for your firm.
Check out an example:
Assume that at your company, one recruiter handles 3 full-cycle job requisitions at a time. Each role filled averages $25,000 in revenue. If, on average, your recruiter can fill at least 1 of these reqs every month using their own resources, this person would generate $75,000 in revenue a quarter.
An IQTalent Xchange 3-req bundle is priced at $4500. The IQTX platform will provide research, including a curated list of qualified passive candidates and at least one, if not multiple, points of contact for each candidate. With the amount of time and effort saved with this research, your recruiter will now be able to fill these 3 requisitions in a single month. Your boutique firm’s new run rate is $225,000 a quarter, which is an ROI of over 3000%!
With greater access to valuable research tools, #Outsourced #CandidateResearch provides many benefits to specialized boutique search firms. Read more on the @IQTalent blog:Click to Tweet8. Scale Your Business
Once your recruiters can handle a larger requisition load, with improved time to fill and cost per hire, you have the necessary systems in place to scale your business.
Scaling a service-based industry is tough. Since service is the product, growth is time-consuming and slow. Any increase in customers or larger-priced services that are more margin-friendly is at the mercy of your human capital. You can only increase customers and services offered to the extent that your team can handle the business.
By increasing the efficiency of your recruiters by allowing them to manage larger req loads and make fills more quickly, you will increase your revenue and margins at a greater pace, allowing you to continue to pay your top-performers well and decrease attrition. You may have the capital to increase your team and grow the business.
If you’re a boutique firm that needs some help and is considering augmenting your research services, let us give you a demo of IQTalent Xchange, your one-stop source for qualified passive candidates.
