Recruitment firms and interim management
Recruitment firms help companies hire employees. Here, we will focus on executive search firms to help you better understand the specific characteristics of the sector, along with its advantages, limitations, and the differences compared with interim management.
What are the specifics of recruiting a senior executive?
Recruitment firms provide you with candidates and charge a fee when one of their candidates is hired.
In the market for “traditional” profiles, recruitment firms offer valuable support and complement your HR department effectively. However, when it comes to executive profiles, the situation has become increasingly challenging.
These high-level profiles, the “rare gem” you are looking for, are scarce and highly sought after, to the point where companies themselves have become almost “candidates.” The market has shifted. For executive recruitment, the average time between defining the need and the executive’s actual start date is now more than six months.
Recruitment firms now increasingly operate in “headhunting” mode, seeking to build relationships with executives currently in permanent positions who may be open to new opportunities, in order to convince them to make a move.
At the same time, senior executives are increasingly drawn to flexibility, the ability to choose their assignments, control over contract duration, and often higher compensation. Many are therefore moving toward independent or umbrella company status.
Executive search firms and interim management: how do they coexist?
Senior executives seeking greater independence and flexibility, especially after 25 years of experience and with expertise they can market directly, tend to look for assignments rather than permanent positions. On their own, however, their network quickly reaches its limits. As a result, they turn to firms capable of offering them assignments.
Some choose consulting firms, where they carry out expert assignments, often short-term, in areas such as strategy consulting or management and organizational consulting.
Those who prefer assignments combining both strategy and operational execution naturally move toward interim management, which meets their expectations and is often highly beneficial for companies as well: immediate availability of the executive, definition of an action plan, and operational implementation to deliver tangible results (department turnaround, improved profitability, change management on a specific issue, etc.).
The interim manager remains external to the company, but for a defined period, they take the lead of a department, or even the entire organization, and operate as an internal executive. The difference is that they remain fully objective, acting solely in the company’s best interests. In that sense, one could speak of recruiting an interim manager.
Some executive search firms, particularly in banking and insurance, are now attempting to develop “interim management” divisions. However, this requires very specific capabilities related to the activity itself, such as: