Hiring? Start by losing the “I’ll do it myself” attitude.

 “I’ll do it myself.” 

As a hiring manager, how many times have you said this when you should really be asking for help? 

As professionals, we have a natural tendency to take on challenges alone to control the outcome. But that one-person-show attitude is not only ineffective, it’s also impractical. 

Would you excuse your dentist from performing a root canal because you think you’ve got it under control? Of course not. You trust the experts to do their jobs, and the same should be true for hiring. 

Instead of taking on the task of hiring all by yourself, consult a trusted search firm. 

The sooner, the better: starting from the moment you realize you need to find a new employee. Or, ideally, even earlier, when you’re thinking about the optimal resourcing and structure of your team. Whether you’re backfilling a vacancy or creating a new role, asking for help immediately instead of initiating the search yourself will set you up for better results—no matter what. 

Here are just a few reasons: 

1. Internal recruiters are at capacity. Professional services in-house talent acquisition teams often are stretched and lack the scale to efficiently source for all their firms’ business staffing needs. Additionally, unless your firm has a dedicated team of recruiters with agency backgrounds and networks, you could be missing out on the best talent. Hence, internal recruiters will often turn to a tried and tested external partner to augment their recruiting capability. And the successful firms invite their search partner to embed as an extension of their talent team, bringing them into hiring manager conversations and looking to them for market intelligence and data to make informed strategic hiring decisions. 
2. You can focus on your business. Your regular operations and business staff still need the bulk of your attention—perhaps more than ever when you’re down a team member. Crafting a job description, running an effective search, and scheduling interviews takes time, so letting your talent team collaborate with your search firm to manage the process allows you to keep business running smoothly. 
3. You won’t always know where to look for talent. If your first instinct is to scour LinkedIn or Indeed , you’re not alone. These are the channels every leader, who is rolling up their sleeves for the hunt, will start with, which means they’re all reviewing the same candidates. No matter how many people cast their lines into the same stream, there will only ever be a finite number of fish, and they won’t always be the best catch. Finding the right team member often is about leveraging personal networks, and external recruiters have much deeper talent networks broader reaches than the average hiring manager. Sometimes, all it takes is making the right phone call and asking the right questions, but that starts with knowing where the big fish are swimming. 

4. You won’t miss out on top-level candidates. The best talent is often on the market for a brief window—or not actively in the market at all—and your search firm is adept at getting these people into a conversation. 
5. You won’t end up hiring the wrong person. Sometimes, we’re so eager to fill an empty seat that we take on talent that doesn’t really match the needs of the role. The best-case scenario is that these candidates rise to the challenge, adapt, and excel. The worst-case scenario is that your new hire becomes a liability, sets you back even further, and makes you restart the search-and-hiring process all over again. You don’t have time to gamble on outcomes. Most likely, you don’t have the resources, either. You need to hire the right person the first time, and having a trusted search firm handle the vetting process will give you a much stronger impression of how a candidate will perform within your organization. 
6. You have time to ensure a smoother transition for your new hire. If you’re conducting a search on your own, you likely won’t have the opportunity to organize an onboarding plan. You might even create a bottleneck in the tasks your new hire will be expected to perform. No one wants to enter a workplace where a backlog of work means there’s not only an overwhelming pile of urgent tasks, but no one with the time to offer necessary onboarding support or training. You don’t want to find a perfect candidate, only for them to walk right back out the door because they think you have a hectic culture. While your search firm pursues that top candidate, you can ensure your new hire will be walking into an environment that is already running smoothly.

If you’re reading this and have been thinking about conducting a search alone—or have already started doing so—send us a message right now. There’s no time like the present for giving your entire team their greatest shot at success.