Jan 10, 2023

Why (Most) Executive Recruiters Don’t Want Your Calls

“Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” While most Executive Recruiters don’t advertise this mantra, this is unfortunately industry standard when it comes to candidates. Why wouldn’t executive recruiters want to hear from top decile candidates? It is simple. Their clients are the companies they are recruiting for – not the candidates themselves. Their job is not to advocate for a candidate, but the company that hired them.  It is also easier for them to source prospects from their existing network, database and use strategic formula for each placement.

However, this is not the way we work at Lancor.

Unfortunately, the traditional hiring process is “reactive” for the executive, who is waiting for a call that may or may not come. At Lancor’s Advisory Business (“LAB”), we do things a little differently than other executive recruiters. We are looking for executives who want to be proactive by thinking like a founder, examining the industry they are in and seeing where the opportunities are to drive real growth. We then bring these opportunities to the most relevant Private Equity firms and let the executive decide if they want a C-Suite role or join the Board while keeping their current role.

If you are going to call Lancor’s LAB, here are the questions that you need to be prepared to answer: 

  1. Have you worked for a PE backed asset?  If so, which one?  (It’s OK if not)
  2. What value did you create while you were at your last few firms? What was the approximate revenue and EBITDA when you joined and when you left?
  3. What did you learn and how would you use this experience in your next opportunity?

The key is to use an actionable asset to showcase how your would actually drive value going forward! Obviously, this is the tricky part.  Perhaps you have an asset in mind.  Great!  That will only enhance your appeal.

However, most executives do not have that specific idea/actionable asset, and if that’s you, no problem.  At Lancor, we have over 13,000 assets that we track that are coming to market. Let’s first determine what the trends are in the very specific industry segments where you have driven value.  Next, we can extrapolate how this experience can be leveraged in the targeted assets that are coming to market.  When we do this, your total compensation is three times (!) what it would be for a traditional role, because we are collectively delivering angles to an investment opportunity.

Interested?  CALL US. We want to hear from you.