Many years ago when I started my career in Executive Search, attracting talented candidates for my client’s positions was easy. Having spent time with my client understanding their business, the position they were looking to fill and the key deliverables of the role, I simply put together an advert which highlighted this and then chose the correct media in which to place the advert. I was so successful I won overseas trips and company awards for selling advertising space. This coupled with a little search work meant that I had a 98% success rate in completing assignments. When you compare this to an industry average of 70% then it is easy to see why I had clients beating a path to my door.
As the years progressed though I found that fewer people were applying to adverts and I had to do more and more search work. I still Stelleanzeigen maintained my 98% success rate but it was becoming apparent that 50% of my candidates were now coming from referrals. In the last ten years this is a trend that has continued and today only 10% of individuals we consider for our clients assignments come from through advertisements.
So what has changed? Well in 1997 McKinsey coined the phrase “war for talent”. In essences they said in their research that talent is in limited supply and that attracting the right people was going to becoming fiercely competitive. Having great managerial talent has always been important, but now in challenging economic times it is ever more critical. Attracting and retaining the best talent in any industry is now a major factor that CEO’s across the globe have to address. For many organisations the mantra of “Our people are our greatest asset” has never been truer and it is especially the case in the financial services sector where products are complex and difficult for the layman to understand.
Also since the first McKinsey report in 1997 we have seen the world evolve and the dawn of the information age has begun. At one time a company’s most valuable assets were tangible for example property or machinery. Now for many organisations especially those in the financial services industry intangible assets such as intellectual capital, brand, and innovative new ideas are at the heart of their business. These new intangible assets are clearly underpinned by talent and the organisation that has the best talent will perform better than competitors.
There has also been a significant increase in the number of places an individual can look for a job. When I first started in executive search, senior executive ad non-executive directors made themselves known to executive search practitioners and everybody else applied for jobs through national or local newspapers or via specialist trade press. Now there are so many options as to where to look for a job that it is confusing for anybody wanting to advertise or look for a new opportunity. As part of my research for this blog post I Googled “financial services jobs” and got 1,120,000,000 potential hits. This is before job you take into account the traditional means of print advertising.
This confusion has led to what I like to term advertising overload
It is impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff and as such the most talented individuals think I can’t be bothered with this and end up not applying. This is where an experienced executive search consultant can lend significant assistance to a client. Rather than competing with everybody else for the limited talent pool that is happy to send their CV’s to every Tom, Dick and Harry a good executive search consultant can identify, approach, assess and sell your opportunity to the indirect market of individuals who are not applying to job advertisements. It is for these reasons that job advertisements no longer work to attract senior talent.
