Working with IT executive recruiters allows companies to tap into specialist talent pools and hire the very best candidates. The most effective leaders often aren’t looking for new roles which means they can’t be found through traditional search. But by working with top executive recruiters that have an extensive specialized network, your company can attract high caliber technology professionals. In this article, we look at how to source executive headhunters with the right expertise for your needs.
Why Work with an IT Executive Search Firm?
IT executive recruiters help businesses to source and hire the top technology talent in their industry. They differ from traditional executive recruiters because they focus solely on the IT or technology sectors. This means that they have an in-depth understanding of the industry and can identify the most suitable candidates for a role. They will also have an existing network of technical professionals that they have established relationships with. This enables them to reach the very best leaders and technical specialists with the right experience and professional qualities.
Qualified IT professionals are in high demand. According to research by LinkedIn, four out of five of the most sought-after skills relate to information technology. These include cloud and distributed computing, middleware and integration software, web architecture and development frameworks, and user interface design. This competitive environment means it’s harder than ever to attract and retain top talent, especially for leadership positions. But working with IT executive recruiting specialists can make it easier.
IT executive recruiters will understand your industry in a way that generalist headhunters can’t match. Their search executives spend everyday sourcing CTO, CIO, and CDO candidates. They continually develop IT job descriptions, review IT resumes, and cultivate IT relationships. This means that their understanding of technical role nuances and the unique needs of technology companies is unparalleled. The best executive recruiters that specialize in IT can even advise organizations on the skills, qualities, and experience that are likely to be needed in a role. They understand succession planning, strategies for building leadership teams, and how to streamline the search process. This consultative approach to human resources helps businesses to source the ideal leadership talent, even if they aren’t quite sure what they’re looking for. It’s especially helpful for new start-ups and rapidly expanding technology companies that are building new teams.
Executive recruiting also relies on the firm’s candidate network. If a search agency has established relationships in the IT industry, then they’ll be able to find talent that generalist recruiters simply can’t. Their executive search team will have relationships with leading C-suite executives, leaders, and technical professionals. This allows them to reach out to ideal candidates, even if these people aren’t actively looking for new executive jobs. Because they know potential employees on a personal level, they can sell roles to them by appealing to their values and ambitions, rather than just a monetary incentive. This helps to attract long-term leaders who are driven by the success of a business and not just their bonus. Having access to a talent pool of IT industry specialists and high-performers enables companies to hire the very best. Organizations can tap into a higher-caliber network of job seekers and select from the cream of the crop.
How Do You Find the Right Agency?
There are a variety of retained executive search firms out there, all offering different services and bringing varied strengths to the table. With so many to choose from, how can you tell which one is right for your needs? The key is to identify your recruiting requirements up front and then request information from companies that can fulfill your needs. Let’s look at some of the criteria to consider.
Industry Knowledge
Even within the IT and tech sectors, there are a wide variety of sub-sectors and industry niches. Manufacturing, oil and gas, renewable energy, software development, and cybersecurity are just a few. It’s important to choose a technology executive search agency with knowledge and experience of your industry. They will be able to match employers with all-star candidates that drive value and inspire their teams.
Candidate Network
It’s also important to find a firm with the right candidate network. Generalist recruiting firms may boast about the size of their candidate pool, but how many will be qualified for your IT role? Drilling down will likely reveal that they don’t have many connections in the technology sector, renewable fuels, or whatever your niche happens to be. But specialist IT executive recruiters like us will be able to tell you exactly how many candidates we know in your particular sector.
Speed & Responsiveness
The speed and responsiveness of a search agency can make a huge difference to talent acquisition. If you’re looking to hire quickly, then you’ll need to know that your firm has the same level of urgency. Ask about the average time it takes them to secure new hires so that you have a benchmark to compare the different agencies. It’s also worth enquiring about whether they have set service level agreements (SLAs) for responding to client emails or phone calls. This will help you find the firm with an approach to customer service that meets your expectations.
Recruitment & Vetting Approach
Another point to consider is their overall approach to recruitment. How do they go about understanding your candidate requirements? What process do their search professionals use for sourcing and vetting potential applicants? How do they handle the negotiation and on-boarding process? This can help you to assess whether they’ll take care of the entire technology recruiting process or just support in gathering resumes. By considering which of these criteria are important to your business, you’ll find it much easier to source the right recruitment partner.
What Makes Riviera Partners Different?
Riviera Partners is one of the leading technology executive recruiters in New York City. We’re committed to finding the best possible leaders for tech businesses and pride ourselves on delivering strong results for clients. We are trusted by industry all-stars and brand new start-ups alike to source top technology talent who will drive real value in their organizations. Our clients include big brands like Bloomberg, Squarespace, ClassPass, Shazam, and WeWork. So why do leading tech companies choose us to find their most valuable team members?
- Extensive network of NYC-based tech professionals that’s unrivaled by other leading executive search firms.
- An innovative recruitment platform that leverages tech to streamline the search process and deliver complete transparency for clients.
- Specialization in the tech sector which means our team has a wealth of experience and in-depth understanding of the industry enabling them to source the most suitable candidates first time round.
It’s this compelling combination that makes us one of the leading technology executive search firms in the USA. We’ve placed hundreds of high-level, VP, and C-suite professionals with technology companies and can help to do the same for yours. Riviera Partners provides an unmatched search and placement service for clients which is why we’ve become the top executive recruiters in tech.
IT Executive Headhunters
We help established technology companies as well as brand new start-ups to recruit high-caliber leaders. As specialist technical recruiters, we can source candidates at the top level. So, whether you’re looking for senior executives, a vice president, or managing director, our search team can help.
For the last decade, we’ve played a role in building the hottest start-ups and most well-known tech companies in North America. We believe everyone deserves to have a job they love, so we’ve built a next-generation executive search and leadership recruiting platform. It matches job hunters with the exacting needs of tech companies, across all IT industries and functions. It’s designed to introduce organizations like yours to brilliant minds in order to solve difficult challenges. With offices in LA, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Bozeman, Montana, we’re sure to find the perfect candidate for your company.
Riviera’s exclusive focus on technology executive search services means we bring decades of collective domain experience. We have tens of thousands of executive relationships and the accumulated data of hundreds of thousands of interactions with technology leaders to bear for our clients on every search. Exceptional technology executives possess a rare combination of leadership experience and demonstrated technical achievement, making them difficult to find and even harder to evaluate. But our recommendation system picks up on the explicit and implicit signals throughout each search to help our clients understand what they really need and our recruiters to find it quickly.
We’re a results-driven technology search agency with a passion for helping clients to reach their full potential. Our drive, our exclusive focus on technology leadership, our unmatched domain expertise, our unparalleled relationship network, combined with our reliance on data-driven insights and artificial intelligence to optimize your search, means that when you work with Riviera, you know you’ll make a great hire. We are relentlessly focused on our clients’ success.
Get in touch with our team of IT executive recruiters today to find your next all-star tech leader.