Headhunting Basics (Part 1) -- When to Engage a Professional Search Firm

At some point, a startup will exhaust the founders’ networks for recruiting/hiring purposes, and must turn to professional recruiters to fill key positions. When the position is a senior executive role, a professional recruiter often becomes even more necessary.

One of the biggest challenges for a startup seeking to use a search firm is that the CEO often has little or no previous experience using them.  There just isn’t enough pattern recognition available to quickly identify, evaluate, and select a recruiter who will do a great job. This is why my partners and I invest some of our capital in a Chief Talent Officer to work with our portfolio companies.  Elizabeth Patterson, our CTO and my co-author for this post, is someone who knows the recruiting ecosystem in detail, and constantly vets which recruiting firms are delivering great outcomes, by role, by industry, by stage, by geography, etc.

Read the full post here.