One of the biggest perceived drawbacks to in-house executive recruiting is not having access to a recruiter’s talent pipeline, which they have typically built over months or years of recruiting for many different companies. But while in-house teams may need to put in some work building a pipeline, it can be done. And in-house teams do have some of their own advantages over recruiting firms that can lead to great candidates.

How In-House Hiring Teams Can Source Superior Talent

One advantage in-house hiring teams have over recruiting firms when sourcing executive talent is an intimate and thorough knowledge of the company that can reveal exactly the type of candidate needed to fill the executive position. No one knows your company better than your own employees, and that knowledge can never be matched by a recruiting firm that has spent a minimal amount of time getting to know the company and the position being filled because they are working with multiple companies and their time is split between them.

Similarly, in-house recruiting teams can leverage the contacts of their own executives in order to source talent, a technique that recruiting firms themselves may use as part of any executive search. Referrals from those within the company are likely to yield more interested candidates than a cold call from a search team probably would.

Partner With Other In-House Teams to Share Sourcing

While much of the strength of an in-house recruiting team is its superior knowledge of the company and its needs, there can also be a lot to gain from partnering with other in-house executive recruiting teams to share information and resources, if the needs are similar enough.

Your in-house team needs to carefully weigh the need to expand their talent pipeline beyond their own abilities and resources against the time and energy it will take to contribute to a partnership, but generally there are often benefits to expanding beyond the immediate circle of your company and its contacts as well, particularly when those haven’t yielded much in the search.

Keep Candidates Close to Form a Pipeline

As your initial executive search comes to a close, the in-house search team or related team should begin to figure out ways of maintaining relationships with promising candidates that didn’t end up getting the position the team was trying to fill. These candidates will form the beginnings of a pipeline that can funnel candidates into the next search more easily and could help fill the next open position faster and more easily.

Creating an email list is one way to keep the pipeline informed about your company and interested in its doings. Networking events could also fuel interest and help pipeline members get to know your company better. Social media pages are another way to maintain some connection with the pipeline, but the page must be targeted to executive positions; the general company social media page will not be specific enough to interest them.

Thrive TRM helps in-house executive search teams build talent pipelines by providing candidate profile importing from LinkedIn, Google and other platforms—data which can then be used to for talent pipelines.  Schedule a demo to see all that Thrive TRM has to offer in-house search teams.

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