Pros and Cons of Using a Headhunter to Fill Key Employee Roles

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter Podcast. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I've really been thinking a lot about all the questions that I have in sales conversations and with my clients once we get going.

When we're focused on the workforce, we're building that workforce element of strategy inside of a business, a lot of times one of the questions that comes up is, “If we've lost a really significant key role, should I use a headhunter?”

Well, that's exactly what we're going to talk about today. Should you be using a headhunter? How do you weigh that decision? If so, how do you get the most out of them? Is it the right fit for you?

It's not easy. It's nuanced. It depends on your business. It depends on your growth rate. It depends on the positions that you're looking for. Even though they can save some time, you may need to make sure you know that you can invest a certain amount of time during certain parts of the process in order to get the most out of it.

We've owned companies where headhunters were a really big part of our fast-growing company. They were very industry-specific. We actually spent time building relationships with trusted partners who were out there doing for us, and it was beneficial.

But the second that you get too reliant on it and you get lackadaisical, you're still going to make mistakes. If you make mistakes when you're paying that kind of investment and in money, it becomes really, really costly because you have to pay a little bit more, sometimes a lot more in order to use their services.

Let's talk today about some of the pros and some of the cons to help you think about whether or not this is right for you. Now, when you think about the paving industry and the infrastructure industry, we have different talent pools that we need.

There are certain times when a headhunter is going to be a better, more obvious bet than others. I had a company recently that we definitely considered this option. We didn't end up having to go this rate. I think more often than not, sometimes you don't unless you're really growing at a rate where you're consistently hiring and you want to be strategic about building that partnership. But is the hire really a key person? Are you looking for very specific skills that a headhunter can go out and help you find and can really access a big talent pool?

That's one of the pros is maybe they have access to a wider talent pool. You're in the business of paving roads or you're in the business of producing asphalt, or you're in the business of building bridges, or you're in the business of supplying software to the paving industry. Whatever it is that you're doing, you're stripping all of the things, you're probably not in the talent industry. You're not in the workforce industry.

While I'll argue with a lot of my clients that you should be, to a certain extent, building some of these assets into your business, because I think having sole reliance on outside resources for these things really puts us at high risk and we're seeing it drive up the cost of recruitment and retention so drastically and we're taking the control out of our hands, but there are times when yes, this is what they do for a living. In fact, they do have a pretty large pool at their fingertips.

If you have a headhunter or recruiter who works specifically in your industry or specifically with the type of talent that you're looking for, it could be something that you really do want to consider.

Also, and this is kind of attached to this piece, they have expertise in talent acquisition. They're probably doing assessments. They're probably used to matching specific job requirements. Maybe they're helpful at helping you understand your company culture and being able to then translate that over in a competitive market.

Also, if you're really crunched for time, it can be a time saver. Recruiting is time-consuming. Finding that person is time-consuming so they could relieve this burden and really let you focus on what you do, what your specialty is, what your business is, and what your business needs you to do while they're out doing the footwork on that.

They may even have industry insights. If they are deep into your industry, they may know things about compensation structure, trends in the market, competitor movements that could be advantageous for you. That is another pro of possibly considering using a headhunter for key roles inside of your organization.

Let's talk about some of the cons. We talked about how it is more costly. If you're using a headhunter, usually it's pretty expensive. They need to weigh the investment against the potential ROI of that specific role.

There's probably a breakpoint where it makes sense and where it doesn't make sense. But also, I think that we should consider another element when it comes to cost. How much would it cost you to invest in being able to do some of this inside of your own business and own that piece of your business?

I think of workforce strategy, designing, at least certain elements of recruitment consistently into your business as somewhere where you can pull a lever. When opportunity knocks, when a $10 million contract, or an opportunity to buy a supplier, or another business and take over more geographic area comes up that you have to be able to pull that lever to hire people, you want a mechanism already built into your business that you can just pull on and open the floodgates of that.

I think that's something that a lot of businesses are considering, “How do I have that inside of my company as an asset that increases the value of my business and gives me the ability to pursue opportunities as well and build a stronger business with my internal team?”

Another con to using the headhunter can be over-reliance. Sometimes we get into these relationships and when I look back at the company where we used a lot of them, I think this is something that probably happened to us.

We probably got over-reliant on it, and we didn't spend any time building an employer brand. We didn't have any actual recruitment efforts of our own. We were completely reliant on them, bringing it in, and we were paying a lot of money for that. It's risky also in that relationship because what is their loyalty to us?

They also have other clients inside of that industry as well. Yes, they have insider tips and knowledge and awareness about your industry, but they also have other clients possibly inside the industry. That's something to keep in mind.

Another thing that I've seen as a con is cultural misalignment in our placements. Sometimes nobody knows our culture better than us. If we do take time to build and own our own employer brand, nobody is better than the company itself at attracting the right talent and repelling bad-fit candidates.

Hiring a bad-fit candidate costs you so much more than just the pay that you're paying them during that time. It can have a devastating impact on morale, culture, productivity, and even your company's reputation. It can be high stakes if we get poor alignment with our culture.

Limited control is another con. You might have less control over the recruitment process. How do you want to screen them? What kind of assessments do you want to do? What kind of concerns do you have about how you're building your team and making those hiring decisions?

Some of that gets taken out of your hands because they are actually doing part of that process. How much do you want to actually own that process? One of the things we talk about when we're developing workforce strategy is the onboarding process, the recruiting, the interviewing, and the onboarding process.

That has a drastically huge impact on retention. We've seen studies say that onboarding processes that are incredibly well-designed and integrated into our companies can increase retention by up to 82%.

It starts early. It starts from some of those earliest touch points in the interview. When you think about that, how much control do you want to give up? When do you want to assume more of the control?

This may be another thing that comes into that decision process when you're considering using the headhunter for key roles inside of your organization. Hopefully, this was helpful for you to think through, is this really the right move for you? Does it make sense for your business? Do you use it in conjunction with building your own internal workforce strategy?

Maybe you're using this as a supplement for very specific roles inside of your company or something that you're recruiting for on the regular because of the direction or the way in which your business is growing.

All of these are questions that first you have to sit down and ask yourself and answer yourself. It's not the same answer for everybody and it's not the same answer for even every situation. I know companies that do have really great workforce strategies and recruitment processes themselves that still have times where they enter into these partnerships, and it's a great partnership that makes complete sense.

Ask yourself some of those questions that I brought up here. Think about how much of this you want to own yourself. How much control do you want to give up? How much influence or impact could this have on your culture?

Also, even if you're going to use a headhunter, the more time and effort you put in upfront to really communicate well with them can make a huge difference as to how effective they are.

Even though it can save you time, you cannot just give up the reins. In order to get the best results, you are still going to have to put some effort into this. Those are the questions that I try to bring up with my clients when we're deciding, “Do we use a headhunter for this role? Or do we have a regular contract with a headhunter inside of our operation to help us grow and recruit top talent?”

I hope you found this helpful. If you're tackling that decision, if you're trying to think about how much we invest in building recruitment consistently into our business to build a pool of candidates, how do we build onboarding processes? What does our interview process look like in order to make sure we're making the smartest decisions possible? I always say, “Hire slow and fire fast.”

The interview is so crucial. Candidate selection is so crucial and onboarding is so crucial. But maybe a headhunter is the best fit for you and maybe it's not at this time. If you want to get a little bit more clarity on the current health of your workforce strategy, we've created a tool for you.

Our Workforce Strategy Assessment can be accessed. You can get through it in five minutes and it's going to help you kind of pinpoint, “Where are the gaps where I'm leaving myself exposed as it's related to the workforce? And where am I pretty shored up and I probably don't need to be spending time.”

You can take that assessment and get the results super quickly and I'm always available to walk you through those results and add any extra insights or provide resources if we have some. That's at storybuilt.marketing/workforce. That link is going to be in the show notes but you can grab that at storybuilt.marketing/workforce.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.