Using data in Executive Search
Data is crucial in every industry, but in Executive Search, it’s everything. Your data is what empowers you to make the most accurate placement and build your good reputation with both clients and candidates. If you have a solid and organized repository of data to start with, it can shield you from some of the key industry challenges.
Key challenges in executive search
Executive Search has some barriers that are unique to the industry. Due to the high caliber of potential candidates, the talent pool is comparably much smaller than that of a broader recruiting firm. Not everyone makes it to the C Suite in their career, so executive search recruiters need to search more extensively to find the right candidates for the roles they’re trying to place.
In addition to a smaller talent pool, executive candidates also tend to be more passive than other subsets of candidates. They are highly valued and highly compensated in their current roles, so there is less incentive for them to move laterally to other organizations.
Add to this the nationwide difficulty in finding candidates at all levels of business in the last year, and the task in the hands of an executive search recruiter has become increasingly more difficult. A 2020 study found that the top challenge for 77% of executive search professionals would be talent shortages. And that’s prior to the impending economic downturn. Effective data management can be a highly effective remedy to offset these challenges and ensure that your executive search firm remains competitive.
The current desired success rate for placements in executive search is 75%. But when firms leverage data to drive innovation, increase efficiency, and cultivate relationships, they will get more placements that stay for longer periods of time.
Data is one of the most efficient and scalable solutions
When you leverage all of the data that you already have on both clients and candidates, you’re better prepared to make the right connections. This data could be anything from niche interests, aspirations, and qualifications of candidates, to key metrics, culture and long-term vision of clients.
With a fully comprehensive view of both your clients and candidates, you can really set your ability to make strong connections s apart from your competitors.
In this eBook, we’re going to give you the background knowledge, tips and tools to run a data-savvy firm and get that extra edge. Ultimately your goal should be to spend less time with disconnected data points by centralizing, optimizing and automating these processes, allowing your team to spend more time on networking, building relationships, and winning new business.
How Data Differs in Executive Search
While data is a critical need in all industries, it plays an especially important - yet nuanced - role in Executive Search. In this industry, there are some key distinctions in the type and use of data collected that must be considered in order to create a solid data management strategy.
Several types of data
First, professionals in executive search deal with several different types of data. Executive search recruiters must keep track of information collected from their clients about the roles they’re trying to fill, company values and more.
On top of that, they need to maintain a database of candidates that they are trying to match to these roles. This data may include demographics, experience, personal preferences, salary requirements, and more.
In addition to client and candidate data, many executive search firms also keep a database of all of their placements and testimonials to use for marketing purposes.
All of this data must be maintained separately, but in flexible and adaptable systems that allow for fluid movement between databases if needed. Which brings us to….
Fluid Databases
While the aforementioned databases must be kept distinct, there is a possibility that data may need to move back and forth between databases when necessary.
For example, a client contact could become a candidate at some point. And a candidate may become a client down the road if placed successfully. And both client and candidate data will eventually need to funnel into your placement database.
This fluid nature of data is one of the biggest unique challenges when using data in executive search. Any data strategy adopted by an executive search firm must account for this ever-changing nature in order to make the most of the data they have.
Data Considerations to Support Firm Strategy & Growth
Now that we’ve taken into account how data and data systems look different in executive search, it’s time to get into what you need to consider if you’re looking to give data a bigger seat at the table in your organization.
Whether you currently have data strategies in place or you are just starting out, here are some key aspects to ruminate on to determine your data initiatives.
Data Ownership
While this consideration is not unique to executive search, it is crucial. Over time, your recruiters will gather large amounts of valuable data from your clients and candidates alike. However, there may be resistance by recruiters to inputting full and accurate information into your system for fear that they will lose access to this relationship data if they move to a different firm in the future.
While there is no clear answer across the board for whether to grant full ownership of this data to your recruiters or to your firm, many thought leaders in the executive search space advocate for recruiter-owned data. When you make it clear that they can take these relationships with them regardless of their employment with your firm, it encourages complete and accurate input of the client and candidate data they collect.
Whatever your firm decides to follow surrounding data ownership, however, it must be clearly stated and inform the building of your data strategies and tools.
Keeping Data Up-to-date
Data is constantly evolving, especially considering data surrounding employment. Candidates may have relocated, evolved their preferences on industry or pay, or accepted a position at another company. And clients may have amended their job description, gotten an influx or reduction of budget, or suspended a position.
Keeping all this data updated from one moment to the next is absolutely crucial to making placements that stick, maintaining a positive reputation for your firm and making efficient use of your resources. If you waste your executive search recruiters’ time attempting to make placements based on outdated information, each one of those aforementioned goals is in jeopardy.
When searching for an Applicant Tracking System to house all of the data on clients, candidates and placements, the capability to automatically make realtime updates is absolutely essential. Thrive TRM is a popular choice for executive search firms, but other solutions like Workday and Oracle Talent Management Cloud are also common alternatives.
Capturing and Retrieving Data
When your recruiters are on calls with clients or prospective candidates, they are receiving an influx of valuable information to enhance their ability to make placements that stick. However, if your data processes do not include simple, streamlined, and organized processes to capture this information, it may go to waste.
If your recruiters need to resort to capturing shorthand blurbs between sticky notes, digital documents and notebooks, vital information will inevitably be lost. When considering ways in which you’ll be using data in executive search, the capturing process must be clearly defined and communicated.
If you make it intuitive to capture this data, your recruiters will be more likely to input this information in full.
Once data is captured, it’s equally as important to ensure that it’s accessible. Part of this involves setting up automations in the capture process that categorizes relevant information into the correct locations. But further, your team needs to brainstorm ways to ensure that when recruiters need to access data at a moment’s notice, they’re able to easily navigate to exactly where it lives.
This is no easy feat, especially when you are dealing with several different categorizations of data. However, with a combination of the right data software as well as the strategic consideration of these issues from the outset of forming your data strategies, it is both possible and worth the investment.
Creating and Maintaining Your In-House Executive Search Database
Your databases are the fuel of your company. And this is where you can put the outcomes of all your data considerations into action. When you create a centralized, well-rounded network of databases, this will be home to all existing relationships that you can leverage to win both new placements and new clients.
When you have a centralized database, you’re much more able and likely to leverage all the data you actually have. This is one of the core tenets and benefits of Data Enablement. In the end, you can make the most of the data that you have, save resources, and gain a competitive edge in your industry.
With so much at stake - and so much opportunity available - having a properly organized, well-maintained and easily accessible system of databases in your organization is the core component of being a successful, data-driven executive search firm.
Can LinkedIn replace your database?
With the rise of popularity of LinkedIn in the last decade or so, it has become a crucial component of any recruiting strategy, especially in executive search. With upwards of 700 million professionals of all backgrounds on the platform, it’s a goldmine of visible and engaged potential candidates.
When LinkedIn began to experience massive growth, some firms saw it as a potentially viable replacement for their in-house databases. However, as time goes on, it is now viewed by leaders in the industry as an important part of the total data system, but just a part nonetheless. Leaders like Joseph Blass, founder and CEO of Ezekia, advocates for combining it with other tools to drive real value.
While LinkedIn can provide the quantity of candidates, it innately lacks the quality needed for an effective and efficient database. Executive search recruiters distill the information that they extract from LinkedIn - as well as other outside sources - into actionable insight that they can leverage by combining it with the conversational knowledge they get from contact with candidates.
Thinking of LinkedIn as a fully functioning database also ignores the many other use cases for data in executive search, such as leveraging your data for marketing/business development and strategic decision-making.
Key Opportunities in Becoming a Data-Driven Executive Search Firm
Your firm will have a competitive advantage when you can use your data to inform your strategy. If your executive search recruiters are armed with data, they are able to make better placements, create growth for the firm, future-proof your strategies, and drive innovation.
Turning conversations into datapoints
Your recruiters are constantly in conversation with both clients and candidates. These conversations are at the heart of your firm. But when you can turn the relationships your recruiters build into concrete data points, you end up with a more well-rounded and nuanced view of the individuals your firm interacts with.
Any bit of insight gleaned from conversations - whether it’s via email, a phone call or in-person chats - can help you build out meaningful subsets of your data. These subsets can be based on anything from psychographic information to interests to any other unique categories of information that may be useful in the placement process or in marketing and business development initiatives.
While these relationships and connections are being made every single day, marrying the conversations with data can help you put a process behind the human strength of your firm.
Scalability
When firms aren’t able to create data points out of relationships as mentioned in the previous point, it makes scaling incredibly difficult. While on a small scale, the “little black book” method of networking to find candidates works well, once you widen the candidate and client scope, it very quickly becomes unsustainable.
Giving your data a bigger role in your organization as soon as possible can safeguard your firm from growing pains. When you add more and richer data to your databases, it will not be any more difficult to manage than smaller databases if you have the correct processes and categorizations in place. This allows you to immediately leverage relevant information to benefit your firm.
This scalability is also felt in terms of safeguarding from human error. When you built out a centralized database (or databases) that allows for easy and up-to-date access to all relevant data, your teams are properly equipped to perform to the best of their abilities.
Enhance diversity initiatives
Creating equity in workspaces is one of the core considerations in the recruiting space, and it is especially crucial in the executive suite where inequality is typically most stark. In addition to the moral and compliance considerations, an investment in diversity and inclusion is also a growth strategy for executive search firms. As a result, many executive search firms have diversity initiatives connected to their list of KPIs. In a survey by AESC, two-thirds of executive search professionals surveyed mentioned that DEI initiatives are “highly important” to their clients.
Data plays a necessary role in supporting these initiatives.
When you are able to easily collect, access and track all information surrounding your clients and candidates, you can leverage that information to help organizations create a more diverse workforce based on their goals.
You can also use this information to track your own firm’s key diversity metrics to ensure that you are doing your part to get a more diverse group of candidates into executive interview seats.
Leverage your placements for marketing
There is no better marketing material than your portfolio of placements. When you are able to put your most well-matched candidate/client combinations on display, you instill confidence in potential clients and candidates that you will not waste their time. Your portfolio is the best indicator of your ability to identify and understand exactly what client needs are and match them to a candidate’s skills and preferences.
When you have a robust and reliable - yet easy-to-use - database of placements, you can access relevant and up-to-date placements at a moment’s notice and improve your speed to pitch. Generating pitch content such as tombstones, testimonials and logo slides is typically a highly tedious process when done manually.
At Pitchly, on average our clients previously wasted 5+ hours each week sorting, pulling and formatting data for this content. And although the end result is valuable, it is best to save your marketing team this time with automation.
And that’s where Pitchly’s data enablement platform can help.
Pitchly can pull your placement data from relevant connected databases and bring them all into a centralized searchable and filterable database. Our forms also make it simple and easy to input new data into this system.
Take a look at our tombstone builder in action
Once all your placement, candidate and client information is there, you can easily filter for the criteria you need. No more searching through multiple systems, then copying and pasting into yet another system to format it. Our data filters can be configured to suit your needs, whether you want to sort by industry, department, diversity metrics, length of tenure, and much more.
Once you’ve selected the relevant content you want to include, it’s ready to export directly to a variety of content formats. Whether you want to create PowerPoint, Word, PNG or website content, you can use our design functionality to format your data correctly and export it in real time.
With Pitchly, our clients see a 93% reduction in the time taken to locate, create, format, arrange and generation placement credentials for pitch content.
If you want to know more about how to leverage the valuable data that you already have to accelerate your speed to pitch and increase placements won, request a demo.
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About Pitchly
Pitchly is a SaaS company based in Des Moines, IA.
The Pitchly platform was built for data enablement. Our mission is to enable data in a way that helps people spend more time on the things that matter to them, and less time on the mundane. And with our platform, we put data to work through automations that save time, improve performance, and allow your workers to focus on what matters most.
Primary industries served include: Law firms, Finance, Consulting, Insurance, Executive Search, and Professional Services. Discover more stories from our clients and see how they put their data to work with Pitchly.