Fill your key positions.

The reality in the search for the best minds is that …

• about 80% of candidates are not actively looking and simply do not read job advertisements;
• Candidates who are thinking about changing jobs should first communicate with a “neutral” party such as a reputable personnel consultant;
• even good and successful companies often do not have a sufficiently strong employer branding to receive qualified responses to advertisements or contact requests;
• even good and successful companies lack the means and resources to recruit successfully;
• “Placement agencies” often only provide companies with candidates who are actively looking for a job or who have exaggerated income expectations and whose half-life in the company will therefore be short.
• many recruitment consultants do not have the professional depth and market expertise to reach and convince executives and top experts.

Excerpt from the
brochure
of the Federal Association of Personnel Managers (BPM):

“The high market volume of over two billion euros per year shows this: In Germany, numerous companies, regardless of sector and size, decide to mandate personnel consultancies. Why is that? The following arguments speak in favor of this:

1. Recruitment consultants offer a broad contact base and an international network that is not always or not sufficiently available within the company.
2. Due to their specializations, personnel consultants have the necessary industry, specialist and methodological skills. Recruitment agencies, on the other hand, usually deal exclusively with researching candidate profiles from databases and compile a large number of CVs from potential candidates in a short space of time. Whether and to what extent they are personally or professionally suitable for the vacant position is generally not examined in depth. In the case of recruitment agencies, the assignment is often carried out by the jobseekers themselves – see Section 296 ff of the German Social Code III – and not by the company seeking employment. Recruitment agencies also work on a purely success-oriented and non-exclusive basis.
3. Recruitment consultants guarantee neutrality and discretion. On the one hand, this is important for the searching company if the vacancy is to be searched for covertly. On the other hand, it is important for the candidates approached, as their interest in the new role should be treated discreetly.
4. Personnel consultants carry out a methodically sound, professional selection process that saves the client personnel and time resources and can offer added value in the well-founded objective profile fit.
5. Personnel consultants make recommendations as neutral third parties. Managers and employees of the company could be biased in the selection process and therefore not neutral if they see their own position at risk, if they do not want to harm the person they may know privately or if they prefer particularly similar candidates (‘Schmidt is looking for Schmidtchen’).”

In addition to the technical part, which is quite transparent, the “match” between the candidate’s personality and the company’s culture is particularly important. A good fit is almost the only guarantee for successful, productive and long-term cooperation. The quality of the entire process is important here.

The first step is to make the effort to carry out a real situation analysis and talk in detail with peers in the company. This generates a requirements profile against which the candidates are ‘mirrored’: by the consultant, who knows the client well; by the results of the personality diagnostics and by direct discussions with the client. The consultant accompanies all steps. This results in a very good and reliable overall picture. However, the key magic word is always “time”, which you have to – and should – invest.

Of course you can. The impact on and accessibility of candidates is unfortunately limited. Good candidates are very reluctant to be approached directly by the competition. The risk of serving as an “informant” or being considered a “potential renegade” is too great. There is usually a lack of trust between potential candidates and companies in order to develop a truly genuine dialog about a possible change. This is different for actively seeking candidates. However, the top performers who are not actively looking are usually the most interesting.

We have been working for many years with the aptitude diagnostic tool from PICompany, which uses the Reflector Big Five personality test as the basis for its tool. This personality test, which is highly recognized in the scientific community, was supplemented by a job-related skills profile. This gives our clients the opportunity to think about the key skills that are important for the advertised position during the briefing with us. The added value you receive is unbeatable. The test results allow a much deeper and more intensive discussion with the candidates. A real added value for every vacancy.

For a long time now, there have been two camps of recruitment consultants: the vast majority offer their clients the concept of only having to pay a fee if a position is actually filled (purely performance-related, “contingency model”); a minority, to which we as PMCI belong, work according to the “one-third rule”, in which the fee is distributed over the duration of the project (“retainer model”).

We are firmly convinced that companies in particular are at a massive disadvantage as customers due to the contingency model, despite the fact that it is so advantageous at first glance. Why do we see it that way?

• Contingency consultants provide no guarantee in the event that candidates leave the company during the probationary period. In extreme cases, this leads to candidates being referred to a “even better” position and then immediately poached from the customer.
• Executive search is an extremely labor-intensive business. However, you have to be able to afford the necessary quality work; it won’t work if you never receive a fee as a contingency consultant for the very complex first phase. A thorough look at the database is never enough, but the contingency consultant can only survive if he invests very little time in the project and limits himself to his database as a source of candidates, completely ignoring the current candidate market.
• Contingency consultants have to fill a position with all their might in order to see any fees at all. This often ends in candidates who themselves have doubts about their fit or the company being persuaded by the consultant with a “Sign first, it’ll work out…” are almost persuaded to take up a position. Collateral damage is inevitable.

Because we work according to the retainer model, we tell both sides openly if we have doubts about the candidate’s suitability, if only out of self-protection to avoid guarantee cases. But also, of course, to protect the customer’s reputation, including that of its own employees, and not to jeopardize the usually long-standing cooperation.

We are convinced that the retainer model is the only one that offers serious personnelconsulting (and not simply “placement”) and treats both candidates and client companies with the respect they deserve.

In the rarest of cases, we fill a position for our clients with “database candidates”:

• The requirements for a specific position at our clients are usually so unique in the combination of criteria that only very few of “our” already known candidates actually fit.
• Those that we “have” would also have to change at exactly the same time want to.
• Due to developments in recent years in the area of data protection and the storage of personal information, the number of usable, up-to-date CVs in our database is decreasing rather than increasing.

For these reasons, among others, we start almost every search from scratch, i.e. by identifying suitable target companies and candidates from a variety of sources. Of course, there are always lucky hits, but these are the exception rather than the rule.