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Running a business means wearing many hats. You have to constantly transition from creative work to logistics to financial management to interpersonal work – it’s a major challenge. This is especially true when some of the hats don’t fit quite right. For some people, financial management is a serious challenge.

What to Look For in a Recruiter When Contemplating a Career MoveHow a good recruiter can help you with your career goals.

If you’re thinking about making a career move, you want guidance from someone with an inside track in the Los Angeles accounting and finance industry. That’s where a good recruiter comes in. Beyond your network and professional circles, a recruiter with a solid background in executive search can hone in on your specific career goals and experience, while giving you insights that will help you make the best move for your goals and needs.

How to know when to look beyond your in-house recruiting team for your hiring needs There are times when your internal recruiting team is completely capable of finding your next hire, but there are also times when you need to outsource to an Executive Search firm. We’ve broken down the situations where you may need to look to other recruiters – and why – to help you find just the right candidates for your hiring needs.

Focus Your in-house recruiting team should focus on your business's core operations. That includes focusing on the roles for your industry, the specific hiring needs of these candidates, and many times, the other day-to-day human resources needs of your hires and employees.

If you’re a consumer products company, your recruiters should be focused on manufacturing, logistics, and marketing candidates. If you’re a technology company, your recruiters should be focused on programmers, engineers, data analysts, and related specialties. If you’re a public accounting firm, your recruiters should focus on attracting the best candidates to your firm, a thorough understanding of your competitors, and how to benefit most from recruiting on college campuses. Creating a partnership with an Executive Search firm that can help you look for anything beyond your core operations is the best way to maximize your resources, so your in-house recruiting team can focus on where they’re needed most.

Specialty If your in-house recruiting team is focused on the core operations of your business, it is certainly not the best use of their time to have them recruit for roles outside this focus. If they do, they will be starting their recruiting cycle from scratch, since they will not have a pool of candidates. Unfortunately, this is when the quality of the candidate pipeline is usually at its lowest – at the beginning and under a time crunch. Your internal recruiters will end up spending most of their time and focus on the low-hanging fruit through online job boards, filtering through hundreds of applicant submissions hoping they find a few that might fit.

For example, every company has accounting and finance needs, but not every in-house recruiting team has the pool of candidates and expertise to fill those roles. This is when it would be beneficial to partner with an Executive Search firm specializing in accounting and finance to help you fill those specific roles.

In addition to knowing what skills are most valuable and what questions to ask, experienced recruiters at Executive Search firms can save you from wasting your time and resources if they already specialize in a discipline outside of your core business, because they are:

already familiar with the strengths, skill levels, and technical needs of candidates and roles in that specialty already recruiting the candidates in that specialty that you would need to spend weeks, if not months, to reach already have a network of qualified professionals who are not actively looking, but would make a move for the right opportunity already have a strong understanding of each candidate’s motivations Perspective In addition to a relatively constant stream of candidates already being sourced for other roles in that discipline, recruiters in Executive Search firms have a unique perspective beyond that of your internal hiring team, since they have invested time in building relationships and developing trust with the candidates in their discipline. Recruiters at Executive Search firms can function as valuable career counselors, so candidates are more inclined to share both positive and negative details about the recruiting process with them.

In other words, partnering with an external recruiter can provide you with a unique perspective. They are privy to feedback that candidates are unlikely to share with a potential employer, such as if someone on your team needs to change their interview style to better attract candidates or other feedback about their experience with your company.

Along the same lines, the candidate is more likely to trust the external recruiter and not see the information they provide about a company or role as a ‘sales pitch,’ since they have developed a relationship and a certain rapport with each other.

External recruiters also have a different perspective on the hiring landscape, since they are working with many different companies in their specific discipline. They are keenly aware of such things as:

Pacific Executive Search is one of the leading accounting and finance industry recruiters in Los Angeles. We work with some of the biggest names in the business, and we're always on the lookout for talented individuals to join our team.

If you're an accountant or finance professional in Los Angeles, we want to hear from you! We offer a wide range of opportunities for those with the right skills and experience. So whether you're looking for a new challenge or a change of scenery, we could have the perfect role for you.