Managing the Search Firm | workforce.com

Managing the Search Firm | workforce.com: "Managing the Search Firm

Hiring is back, and so is the uneasy relationship between workforce management executives and the search firms they use to fill open positions. High-performance partnerships are possible if the search firm is flexible and expectations are clear.
By Fay Hansen earch firms crippled by the 2001 recession are nearing full recovery as client companies resume hiring and labor markets tighten for specific occupational groups. With more employers ready to spend part of their staffing budget on outside recruiters, vendor management issues are back on the table.

'There is no rule book for clients or recruiters,' says Jeff Kaye, CEO of Kaye Bassman International Corp., a Dallas-based search firm with 80 recruiters.

To complicate matters, the search industry itself is in the middle of a substantial transformation, with the lines between retained, contingent, container and contract recruiting increasingly blurred.

Two-thirds of the top 25 U.S. recruiting firms are reporting double-digit revenue growth this year on top of a 21 percent increase in 2005, according to Hunt-Scanlon, a market research firm. Fee revenue for Korn/Ferry International, the industry heavyweight, jumped 38 percent last year to $452 million, with 474 recruiters conducting more than 8,000 searches worldwide.

The search industry is expecting a 27 percent increase in the number of assignments received from corporate clients in Q2 and Q3 2006, according to the survey of 145 executive recruiters by Execunet, a recruiting network. To prepare for sustained growth in the employment market, 55 percent of search firms plan to hire additional professional staff in Q2, a significant increase from the 32 percent that added staff in Q1.

The emerging trend in the search firm industry is to create more vertical capability, with executive search firms moving into middle management and technical recruiting. Korn/"