Why I stopped hiring myself

I used to hate executive recruiters and refused to use them. Why would I pay someone $60,000 to connect me with an employee I could find myself on LinkedIn?

But I was wrong. Recruiters can be a tremendous asset. Here's why.

When you run a business, you're distracted. And most entrepreneurs are like me, high pace, distracted, and trying to put out fires. One of the biggest fires is often hiring. You need someone to run X, Y, Z initiative at your company, and every day you don't have them hurts. It either means you need to run it or it doesn't get done poorly.

In the past, I tended to do a blitz. I'd go on LinkedIn, find a bunch of candidates, then, because I was busy, I'd do a half assed interview of 3-4 people and hire the best one, even if I wasn't 100% sure about them. Sometimes, the whole process would just sit idle for months because I was too busy, then I'd panic and impulse hire someone months later, damaging my business in the process.

It turns out that hiring a new executive is insanely time consuming. For each candidate, it's at least an hour of your time, so as a busy CEO, the last thing you want to do is spend 8 hours interviewing 8 candidates, most of whom you will never hire. This, it turns out, is a perfect opportunity for delegation.

Now, when I hire an executive or CEO or exec, I always hire a recruiter. There's three key reasons I do this:

1. I have the recruiter conduct all the initial interviews and record the Zoom videos. This means that I can quickly skim each video and do a quick vibe check. Do I think I'd click with them? Do I like the way they present? This is a massive time saver. We all know what it's like to get 10 minutes into an interview only to realize the person is a dud, then feel obliged to stay on and ask them more questions to avoid being rude. This solves that. The recruiter spends the time, you skim the videos.

2. The recruiter keeps the ball moving forward. The recruiter doesn't get paid in full until they find you your person, so they naturally keep the process moving behind the scenes, even if you get sidetracked. Something you might let sit for months, will often take far less time because the recruiting is pressing ahead even when you're not paying attention.

3. The recruiter widens the funnel. Yes, we often hire candidates that we found ourselves, but the recruiter often adds additional candidates that we never would have found. For example, when we were hiring a CEO for AeroPress, the recruiter found us Gerard Meyer, who was 5x more experienced than every other candidate. He just wasn't on our radar.

Let's think about the cost of a recruiter. Say you're hiring a CEO or top level executive for $300,000 per year.

The cost of the recruiter will be around $60,000 (20% of first year salary).

For that, they will:

• Widen the funnel and give you more optionality
• Save you 10-15 hours of interviewing people you'd reject within the first 5 minutes anyway
• Keep the process moving, even when you're busy.

In the case of a high level hire, the cost of a bad hire is millions, or even tens of millions of dollars, and the cost of delaying can be equally expensive.

Because of this, I've come around to recruiters.

One note though: most recruiters are really annoying. They want to do weekly update calls and don't record their Zoom calls. It's a very old school industry and you need to ensure you work with modern firms that will be scrappy and take up as little of your time as possible.

My two favorite recruiters are:

Tighe Burke from SRCH Partners for large CEO/VP hires.

Matt Hollingsworth from Align for SMB CEO/VP/Exec hires.

Tell them I sent you!

Originally published in the My hairline is receding and I'm going gray. issue of Never Enough.