Over the past number of years, the concept of establishing partnerships and alliances between like minded businesses and organizations has been growing as a key success strategy.

These relationships have enabled corporations and not-for-profits alike to work together toward a common purpose and to leverage their capabilities to increase their competitive advantage.

Most commonly, alliances and partnerships typically lead to long lasting relationships, but they take time and energy to develop. As well, the relationship needs to lead to cost savings, access to additional non-core or specialist competencies and provide the same level of trust and respect you expect from colleagues within the walls of your own organization.

While partnerships and strategic alliances have been applied in a variety of business areas, one of the growing trends is to develop a strategic alliance and relationship with an executive search firm of your choice, especially when hiring management or executive level positions, senior level or “C” suite executives.  The reasons are many and include the following:

In depth organizational knowledge – Since the stakes are quite high when recruiting for a senior level professional, a partnership will allow the search professional to understand your organization in depth. They will get to know your strategic and operational plans, they will meet and understand the skills and challenges of the senior team members intimately and this will enable the search professional to make judgments on potential new candidates.

A trusting relationship - Relationships are built on interpersonal communication, trust and integrity. This means spending a good deal of time to get to know your search firm such that you actually have a strong personal relationship with the key personnel and the consultants who will be working on your assignments. In other words, their personal and professional values, reputation and approaches are synonymous with yours.

Cost effectiveness – While tendering a request for proposal for a search projects may be part of your system of financial control, it is not a cost effective method of doing business. Each time you assign a new consultant to an assignment, they must spend a good deal of time learning about your organization. If they don’t do this, you are risk of the new employee not working out.

Environmental knowledge – The more a search professional knows about your organization and your industry, the more the consultant will understand where to target, search for and resource potential candidates. Over time, the consultants will have met many candidates who can be called upon to determine personal interest and/or to network with other potential candidates. Having this so-called candidate databank and relationship network saves time and money.

Systematic, consistent process – Your search firm will have a systematic and proprietary approach to the sourcing of candidates and the recruitment process itself. This provides assurance of absolute compliance with all legislation and human rights in your jurisdiction.

Effective selling - When speaking to potential candidates, your search partner will be able to effectively sell the potential job because they have gained the in depth knowledge of your organization and its people. They understand the challenges, the skills and capabilities required and can portray excitement about the opportunity.

Effective assessment – Your partner search firm will consistently apply assessment tools that will allow you to compare and contrast new employees with current employees. This will help to ensure that new team members can adapt quickly to the new environment and can make a contribution to the organization almost immediately.

Timely access – One of the key values of developing a longer term relationship with a search firm is that it gives your organization priority attention. There is no time spent on writing and reviewing requests for proposals or learning the company history or strategic goals.  In other words, the search consultant can jump right into the search process having only to spend time learning about the specific job and how this will fit into the established team.

Strategic alliances and partnerships are simply the way to go. Greig Clark, founder of the well known College Pro Painters for instance, recently reported that he turned to a strategic alliance with a search professional because recruiting senior executives was too much of a high risk game. In his view, partnerships are the only way to stay on the growth track. From my experience, this is good advice!

Source: The Ultimate Partner, Greig Clark, Profit Magazine, January/February, 2011