Alert: It’s now a business imperative to fill your strategic impact jobs with top talent. So if you’re struggling to successfully recruit for your strategic impact jobs in hot areas like AI and robotics, this article will provide you with some answers and action tips on how you can improve your recruiting results with the use of Apex recruiters.
A Strategic Opportunity For Talent Acquisition
The CEOs of many major corporations like Meta, Amazon, and Google have determined that the future of their company will literally depend on their employee capabilities in new technology areas like AI. TA leaders now have an amazing chance to have a direct and highly visible strategic impact if they prioritize their recruiting so that it now focuses on filling “strategic impact jobs” with the best available talent.
Why We Now Need Apex Recruiters For “Strategic Impact Jobs” (SI Jobs)
The future success of so many companies will now depend on their corporate capabilities in a handful of areas that I call “strategic impact jobs” (Which currently include AI, robotics, data security, Quantum computing, and tariff reduction).
Unfortunately, this common focus has created intense recruiting competition, making it almost impossible for standard recruiters to successfully fill these strategic impact roles with top talent. This means only recruiters at the very top of their game (i.e., Apex recruiters) now have a realistic chance of succeeding in this epic talent battle.
What Is An Apex Recruiter?
Apex recruiters hold a similar status to apex predators in the animal kingdom. They are “the hunters” at the very top of the talent acquisition chain, having reached “the apex” (or top) of the recruiter hierarchy. They are the only recruiters who can effectively land top talent in these SI jobs.
Apex recruiters differ from traditional recruiters in four basic areas. First, they have a different attitude because they are much bolder and more aggressive. Next, they are objective decision-makers instead of relying on intuition and past practices. They rely exclusively on data to make important recruiting decisions. Third, they are literally masters at selling prospects and candidates. This is the critical success factor when you’re trying to recruit SI talent that has so many choices and options. Finally, Apex recruiters use a more advanced recruiting toolkit (For example, talent pipelines and personalization).
Because of these differences, Apex recruiters have become the only recruiters with a reasonable chance of routinely winning head-to-head recruiting battles with corporate recruiting giants like Google and Amazon.
When You Are Assessing A Potential Apex Recruiter… Look For These Differentiators
Whether you are trying to recruit an Apex recruiter from another company or attempting to find one among your current recruiting team, it’s essential that you only use selection criteria that cover the top 8 defining characteristics of a successful Apex recruiter. Those characteristics include:
Exceptional selling skills – this is an absolute requirement. Your prospects/candidates for SI jobs have so many choices (including staying where they currently are). An Apex recruiter literally has no chance of success if they don’t first have a track record of convincing reluctant prospects to apply formally. Then, once they become a candidate, a track record of convincing the top candidates to remain in your hiring process until the end. Finally, they have the selling skills to get a majority of your finalists to accept your offer.
A track record of aggressive recruiting and poaching – because often 90% of your recruiting prospects will be currently employed. To succeed, a recruiter will need both an aptitude and a track record of poaching employees directly away from top employers. As an experienced poacher and Apex recruiter, they won’t be hesitant because they fear retaliation from the companies they target.
An Apex recruiter must be data-driven – today, it’s impossible to deny that both the business world and the recruiting world are rapidly changing. And that breathtaking rate of change means that past practices in recruiting have rapidly become obsolete. As a result, to be successful and gain the respect of their hiring managers, Apex recruiters must make sure that the majority of their decisions are objective and based on data. In addition, Apex recruiters realize that the only way to continually improve your recruiting results will be to continually gather performance data/metrics so that they can continually determine what’s working and what’s not.
A track record of hiring exceptional performers and team players – if your company is going to lead its industry in an SI area. Merely filling each open position won’t be enough. Instead, you will need to have a recruiter that lands new hires whose performance is consistently ranked in the top 25% of all new hires in that job. In addition to hiring top performers, their new hires will also be consistently rated as exceptional team players.
A recruiter who is also a business expert – one of the keys to success is your Apex recruiter’s ability to fully understand the business and its needs. Knowing the business will be essential if your recruiter is going to gain the complete trust of both their hiring manager and each top prospect.
Evidence that they are highly requested by hiring managers – hiring managers are the ones who pay the highest price when their recruiter fails to land a top candidate. So, look for evidence that your Apex recruiter candidate has been the first choice of the most critical hiring managers.
A recruiter that uses personalization in order to stand out – perhaps the most effective no-cost way of standing out among the many recruiters who are stalking each candidate is personalization. Look for recruiters who always personalize their messages and, where feasible, the hiring process so the candidate feels important and like they are being treated as individuals.
Experience in executive recruiting is a plus – executive recruiters and Apex recruiters both share the top of the recruiting pyramid. And because both focus on poaching and often use similar tools. It makes sense to initially put those Apex recruiting candidates with successful executive search experience near the top of your list.
Implementation Tips (For those who want to proceed to the next step)
If you’re considering implementing an Apex recruiting effort, here are a handful of tips and action steps that can help you get started.
Hire Apex recruiters who are already developed – If you need recruiting help right away, developing your own isn’t a viable option. Unless you are a larger organization that already has advanced recruiting capabilities, you won’t likely find any Apex recruiting candidates in your current group. This means that in most cases, you should focus on hiring already-developed Apex recruiters from other companies that are known to have strong recruiting teams.
No, a regular recruiter can’t do this job – In my experience, most corporate recruiters simply don’t have the attitude, willingness to take risks, or aggressiveness necessary to succeed in this job. In fact, in the corporate world, I have found way too many recruiters can best be classified as RHINOS (Recruiters In Name Only).
Prioritize SI areas and only assign Apex recruiters to those jobs – allowing non-apex recruiters to fill strategic impact jobs is a huge mistake. First, because they will have a painfully low success rate. But also because an inadequate effort will likely hurt your image among other potential strategic impact candidates.
A strong business case will be required – I have found that almost everyone involved in the recruiting process resists major change. So, if you want the full support of your executives, TA leaders, and hiring managers. It’s essential that you work with the COO’s office in order to build a powerful business case. As part of that case, be sure to quantify in dollars the impact of both hiring and losing a game changer in one of these strategic impact jobs.
Don’t outsource your strategic impact recruiting – although there are multiple external vendors that will argue that they can fill your strategic impact jobs for you. I would resist that temptation. I have found that outside recruiters can’t effectively sell your company. Simply because they don’t work there, and because they don’t work there, many top candidates simply won’t trust them.
Don’t forget retention – it’s important for TA leaders to remember that they won’t have to recruit for so many SI jobs. If they convince HR to take effective retention actions proactively. That will allow you to keep both the new hires and the current employees that they already have.
Final Thoughts
For years, corporate executives have assumed that the business impacts from successful recruiting in the many different functional areas were pretty much the same. But it’s time for that assumption to change. Now, it’s becoming clear to almost everyone, from executives down to HR. A few technology areas like AI, robotics, and Quantum computing will literally become the primary drivers of both future corporate direction and its economic success. And it is this now-defined strategic importance that makes putting together a powerful Apex recruiting team so essential for continued corporate success.
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Note for the reader
This is the latest article from Dr. Sullivan, who was called “the Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company.
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