When you have had a terrific day at work, what happened? What sparked joy for you? Did you solve a problem, delight a customer, help a co-worker, launch a new initiative, or finally succeed in your evil plan for global world domination? (Hey, we don’t judge.) What sparked joy for you?

In metropolitan areas like Washington DC, it's become remarkably difficult to hire highly skilled employees and senior staff members. Trying to hire on your own has become more expensive than paying someone a fee to help you recruit. 

Here's why:

The news headlines might blare about future economic slowdowns or potential future recessions, but right now we have full employment (are you seeing any stories about layoffs from well-managed firms? No.) Quite the opposite, some organizations are hiring like mad.

So with low unemployment and fewer candidates actively looking for work, more employers are vying for the attention of fewer available and interested candidates. Consequently a few things happen in your recruiting process. Your job advertising will yield lots of candidates who are not remotely qualified (this is true in any economy) but far fewer candidates who are qualified. Next, when you try to schedule those few good people for interviews, you'll quickly discover that some of the best candidates will withdraw before the first interview because they already accepted a job offer from another employer. Or perhaps candidates accept a first interview with you but then decline a second interview.

To add insult to injury, the job advertising market itself is increasingly complex and fragmented because of all the competition between Google for Jobs, Indeed, Linkedin, Glassdoor, CareerBuilder and others. When you have a poor response to your job advertising, it's difficult to know whether you used the wrong job title, wrote an unappealing job description, posted your job in the wrong place, or maybe your job is just not as attractive to candidates compared to their other career options. All you see is who responded to your ad. You can never see who you didn't reach.  

Finding the next leader of your organization by serving on a search committee is a long process, full of potential pitfalls. It’s also an honor and a privilege. But although the conversations are fascinating, the daunting complexity of the decision and the risk of making a mistake can weigh heavily on each committee member.   

Happily, having the right decision-making process can dramatically improve your odds of success. Long before you develop the job description, and certainly before you begin interviewing candidates, the search committee needs to develop their decision support process, where the information on the position and candidates is gathered and organized effectively. Although “deciding how to decide” can sound terribly bureaucratic, being attentive to this governance question is important. You need to understand who has the authority to decide, who needs to approve the decision, who should have input into the decision, and what information should be used to make the decision. Most importantly, this process will also need to include enough time to consider all the gathered information.

So what should you consider when you evaluate executive search firms proposals and what should you discuss with each search firm?

From my work with search committees, one question that often comes up is how to evaluate whether a search firm is evidence-based or data driven. Staffing Advisors' entire approach to hiring is evidence-based. But how can that be proven, or compared to another search firm? 

I'm often asked by both candidates and clients, "So how is the job market?" Candidates want to know if they will be able to find their next job. Employers want to know how hard it will be to find their next employee. And this question of, “How is the job market?” seems like a reasonable way to start that conversation.

As an executive search firm, we're often invited in for conversations when there are questions about an employee's performance. In having these many discussions over the years, we've gained a fair amount of expertise in diagnosing and assessing the many factors that can lead to poor performance (knowledge, skills, abilities, attributes, cultural fit, and environmental factors). And understanding these factors is often essential to do our job successfully.

The hiring process can be a nauseating rollercoaster of emotions—from the emotional high you feel when a top candidate enthusiastically accepts your job offer, to the sickening corkscrew of misery when:

How does your employer's reputation affect your career? Executive recruiters know quite a bit more about that question than you might expect. 

We're in the room when hiring managers decide who to interview, so we know how outsiders perceive the people who work for your organization. It's common for hiring managers to attribute the company’s reputation to everyone who works there. We also conduct the social media background checks as part of our due diligence, so we know when your (formerly private) management matters become all-too-public.

Conversely, for you hiring managers reading, we know precisely how responsive candidates are to your job opportunities. We see first-hand how job seekers are more eager to respond to job opportunities from highly reputable organizations, and how they shy away from organizations with bad reviews on employer review sites. 

As hiring process experts, it's our job to know exactly how your Glassdoor score affects your abilty to recruit, and how your employer's current reputation will affect your own ability to land your next job. 

After a lengthy hiring process, you really, really, want the candidate to accept your job offer. And why wouldn't you? The cruel irony of staffing is that the recruiting process only happens when you are already overworked and understaffed.

Why does a headhunter need to know about long-term employee retention and how to prevent employee turnover? Why do we read the latest research? Because knowing what causes people to leave their job, and what causes people to accept a new job is our stock-in-trade. That's what we do all day, every day. Executive search firms make a living replacing underperforming employees with top performers recruited from other organizations.