idealpeople blog

Now this article was an interesting find. It’s a list of the world’s “most influential” headhunters.

Where on earth did this come from? How did they figure it out? To be frank, we’re not sure.

That’s not to say it’s a worthless exercise. In fact, every CEO should have a black book of a couple of great Headhunters.
Every Staffing/Recruitment Manager should know at least 5 reliable staffing partners. HR folks should know a couple of superior Consultants. Every Line Manager accountable for a performing team and involved in Recruitment should maintain a list of fantastic recruiters, to call when a business-critical hire needs to be made and the list of ‘Cheap & Cheerful’ CV-slinging internet agencies HR found you (often called a PSL) aren’t delivering you the right people and results.

If you are in the Business of Recruiting Recruitment Consultants – like we are - you should know where all the best people are working.

And finally, you, the Ruthless Career Climber, the Jobseeker, the Opportunity Watcher - should know who the best Recruiters are.

Every business serious about talent should have a diversified, multi-touch-point approach to hiring, which should always include 3rd party support from external Staffing Companies who know your market.

However, in case you haven’t got a list of recruiters, and in case you need to find out who are might well be worth calling, here’s some simple tips…

Step one
Join Linkedin – assuming you haven’t already. There are other Social Networks we’ve toyed with like Xing where you can easily ‘locate’ Recruiters, but nowhere does it better than Linkedin as you get a greater level of visibility over their effectiveness.

Step two
From your Linkedin Console, click the ‘Services’ switch (That’s a blue button on the main screen)

Step three
Click ‘Recruiters’ which is a link down the side left of the page. Now – I did this search on a Sunday Afternoon. The first interesting point is that, despite some of the less positive publicity about Recruiters out there in Cyberspace, there’s a lot of people out there saying great things about Recruiters. In fact, at the time of writing, there were more than 15 testimonials written about Recruiters in locations as diverse as Singapore, Bombay, San Francisco, Cambridge, UK and Spain. That’s pretty good coverage in the last 12 hours, and as it takes time and effort to recommend a recruiter - particularly on a Sunday afternoon - you can be assured that these people are working hard to give a great service for people.

Now your list of Recruiters is current. Nice. But who’s the Best Recruiter?

Step Four
From the ‘Linked in Service Provider Recruiter’ screen, simply click the blue ‘Top Results’ link in the top right half of the screen and sort your list in seconds from being the most Recent, to the ones who have made the most visible impact in terms of number of Recommendations from others.

Voila! The first thing that stands out is that at the time of writing there are two Idealpeople Recruiters in the top 10 of Recruitment Service Providers in the world. The second is that these people in the top 10 have amassed between them between 30 and 100 customer testimonials each, nearly 470 people altogether! Gulp. That’s a whole lotta love.

Now, we’ve looked at the Weaknesses of other tools alleged to give real Web 2.0 type guidance to the online jobseeker on the Quality of Recruitment Firms, and their shortfalls (See our article on RecruitRank) – We at Idealpeople Towers are certain that this is a more sensible way to work out who your best option for an Agent or Talent Supplier might be. And it’s not just because we’re top 10 in the world (twice). Wouldn’t you put your trust in someone with visible endorsements from real people than someone with no visible endorsements?

You now have complete visibility of the top 10, 20, 50, 100, or even 500 most highly recommended Recruiters in the World are – in order by number of recommendations. Cool. This is made better when you know that more than 60,000 recruiters have an Account on Linkedin.

Now we have found the list of up-to-date recommendations of the most highly endorsed Recruiters in the world, let’s localise it.

Step Five
Go to the ‘Change Location’ link (Again the blue writing in the top right corner) and select your country of choice. For this exercise, we will use UK. We are very proud to say that at time of writing, Idealpeople Consultants dominate almost half of the UK top 10 which isn’t bad considering the vast numbers of Recruiters who ‘live’ on Linkedin.

Now you have a geographically relevant list of the top rated recruiters. You can dig around in their profile information to find out more about the people they have worked with, both candidates and clients, and see if their area of expertise matches your career or hiring needs.

You will soon realise that personal information about the Recruiter should allow you to make a more personalised approach to them, selecting a partner with confidence has never been easier.