Executive Recruiting in Upstate NY

Brown Schroeder & Associates, Inc.

Recruiting Specialists for Mid-sized Firms in Upstate, New York

Client Problem Defined

Small to mid-sized firms employ over 50% of Americans. Managers and owners of these firms are busy driving revenue, increasing efficiency, and scanning the horizon for emerging advantages against the competition. Most don’t have the cash flow luxury of sustaining a large human resource department staffed with dedicated recruiters, yet all readily and accurately acknowledge that people are their number one asset.

The Current State

When faced with the time-consuming challenge of filling an important position, managers of most small to mid-sized for-profit and not-for-profit organizations use a combination of internal postings, external postings, and the services of contingency firms – external recruiters that are paid a fee only if the candidate they submit gets hired. The result: endless résumé submissions from unqualified candidates to sift through, a blizzard of regulatory paperwork to stay on top of, and the sporadic submission of candidate résumés from contingent recruiting firms who haven’t really done their homework to identify most qualified talent. Most contingent recruiters exhibit the behavior of someone incented to win a race, because they are incented to win a race, identifying most available talent from a frequently overused database. By contrast, Brown Schroeder always performs original research and utilizes unique sourcing techniques to find the skills, traits and experience most needed by the client for the role in question.

The Brown Schroeder Value Proposition

We work on retainer only, hired to research, entice, interview, verify and present three to five qualified candidates for review by the client firm. We don’t work on dozens of searches at once, hoping volume will make up for the client engagements we fail to fill along the way. Instead, we focus our attention on your search, a commitment we make to you in return for your firm’s commitment to work exclusively with us to fill the current opening in question. We don’t turn our search work over to inexperienced “salesy” recruiters; your search will be conducted by the Brown Schroeder executive recruiter you met when you engaged our firm, experienced experts in identifying management talent at all levels.

While researching and identifying most qualified talent, we are also marketing your firm to potential future employees. Before beginning an engagement, Brown Schroeder takes the time to understand the value proposition of working with your team because we understand that we are in fact the face of your organization to the talent we are targeting. Patricia Phillips, the executive recruiter focused solely on Upstate New York, also knows how to sell the Upstate New York lifestyle to candidates that might not know and love our region – yet.

What positions are our specialty?

Rather than specializing in certain functional areas, our specialty is you – a mid- sized Upstate New York firm with limited time to dedicate to sourcing management talent. When you need to find a talented product manager or director, a regional manager, a functional leader for marketing, finance, operations, sales, or perhaps critical engineering talent, we can help. These are but a few examples of the types of positions that are critical to the success of your firm. While Patricia Phillips, dedicated executive recruiter for upstate New York, has guided the careers of managers from each of the aforementioned functional areas, that's not enough. Functional expertise is the easy part to identify; finding managers with vision, managers who aren't afraid to lead, managers who can work through ambiguity, managers who understand the heavily-matrixed inter-dependency of all players in a mid-sized firm – that's the hard part, and that's our expertise.

The Brown Schroeder Engagement Process:

• Our engagement begins with a face-to-face interview with the hiring manager to fully understand the desired traits, skills, and experience for the role in question. Crystal-clear Clarification on all three components is critical for sourcing a terrific match that "sticks." In this meeting, we will also solicit the hiring manager’s opinion of firms that might provide fertile ground for sourcing ideal talent. When engaging our firm, clients don't have to worry about “off-limits” issues that could restrict us from recruiting from their targeted competitors, as often happens when working with larger recruiting organizations that work for multiple firms in one industry.


• Brown Schroeder prides itself on converting position and company descriptions that “describe” into accurate, vibrant marketing documents that “sell,” designed to attract the interest of targeted talent. With a signed contract and your approval of our company and position description document, Brown Schroeder begins performing original research to identify talent. We will research our client's industry niche, locally and nationally (if the hiring manager is open to talent from outside of Upstate New York), to identify ideal talent. We rely on our own detailed original research for our client assignments, leveraging the efforts of our dedicated researchers, rather than culling names from a proprietary database of largely unemployed candidates.


• Once talent is identified, we conduct detailed, proof-based face-to-face interviews, screening for candidates that meet the needs of the hiring manager. For those candidates that make it through both our initial phone screen and face-to-face interview, we document our results and present the top three to five candidates for review by the client firm.


• Reference checking is an integral part of the assessment process that we perform as well, in sharp contrast to some recruiting firms that conduct reference checks to merely "check the box" that they were done. Contingent recruiters are not necessarily rewarded to "dig" during the reference checking process to test the information gleaned from candidate interviews, as they are in a race to win your fee – transaction volume from “speed to closure” is king. Brown Schroeder is only incented to find optimal talent for your organization.

Time saving side-benefit

With a retained search, our clients no longer have to invest their time vetting candidates that network and "informational interview" their way directly in the door; just refer them to us where we will treat them with respect and evaluate the viability of their candidacy alongside that of other candidates. The days of worrying about the time stamp on a résumé, or "how did we become aware of this candidate" are over, as we are rewarded for finding you the ideal candidate, period.

Fee

An Upstate New York engagement with Brown Schroeder is most-often competitive with the fees charged by contingent firms. The key difference is a commitment to work with Brown Schroeder exclusively through the successful completion of the search, and the timing of fee payment. The billing schedule for our search fee is 1/3 due upon contract signing, 1/3 is due 30 days after contract execution, and the last 1/3 due upon acceptance of an offer by the successful candidate. We commit our resources to your search, and you commit your trust in us to lift the recruiting effort for the search in question off of your shoulders.

How to Begin:

When an important manager announces his or her pending departure, or you decide it’s time to make some changes to your management team, call Patricia Phillips at (585) 472-5057, or email her at pphillips (at) brownschroeder (dot) com. You can view Patricia Phillips' online profile (at this link).

Our goal: To make it difficult for you to choose between our qualified candidates.

Download a PDF friendly version.