Founded in 1948, Robert Half, a global talent solutions and business consulting firm, works with organizations of all sizes to address their staffing, recruitment, and workforce planning challenges. Their executive search practice group helps companies build superior leadership teams, with a focus on C-level and VP-level roles, while expediting the hiring processes and ultimately helping companies find the best available executives. What makes Robert Half one of America’s best professional recruiting firms is its ability to complete the executive search within 90 days or less.

In this interview with Manage HR Magazine, Wayne S. Mello, President of Robert Half Executive Search, discusses at length the company’s capabilities in executive search.

Could you give our readers an overview of Robert Half?

Robert Half is the world’s largest specialized talent solutions and business consulting firm, which connects opportunities at great companies with highly skilled job seekers in the market. We offer contract, temporary, and permanent placement solutions for finance and accounting, technology, marketing and creative, legal, and administrative and customer support roles. Robert Half’s subsidiary, Protiviti, is a global management consulting firm that provides internal audit, risk, business, and technology consulting solutions. We have offices throughout the world and help global organizations recruit candidates for C-suite positions, including CEO, CFO, CIO, CTO, and VPs.

Could you describe some of the challenges employers face today while hiring potential candidates?

There is no argument that hiring new team members can be daunting and sometimes tricky. Oftentimes, companies are forced to leave a position unstaffed because they fail to find the right candidate. Sometimes, they find the right fit but lose the candidate to a different company. We understand there are no shortcuts to successful employee search and placement. We strive to help organizations by offering our resources and expertise to improve their executive leadership hiring results.

The upheaval caused by the pandemic continuously reverberates through the talent search market, forcing companies across industries to move to go remote — a challenging transition for many. However, most of these organizations have adjusted to the new norm and have shifted to remote or hybrid work. One of the significant benefits of these new arrangements is that companies could increase employee productivity and reduce capital expenditures. Despite these obvious benefits, there are many downsides to the new work culture. First, many executive candidates are currently working from home and so are the hiring managers. Although many companies are slowly resuming work from the office, many are still leveraging a hybrid work model. Moreover, there is a growing concern over new COVID-19 variants and more outbreaks. The hybrid work model is gaining steam, but many organizations haven’t implemented it completely due to technological challenges. Though many companies shifted their in-office work to a remote or hybrid model, their current tech stack isn’t ready-made for a hybrid workforce. To truly support a hybrid work model, executives will need to reimagine their IT investments and transform their tech stacks.
Many employers are new to hiring off-site talent. Finding potential candidates who are willing to work remotely or in a hybrid environment is challenging. First, companies need to find the professionals and vet their skills, and then they need to conduct interviews remotely and assess whether the candidate will thrive in a remote work situation. This is essential because off-site are no longer bonded with their fellow employees and management teams, which makes employee retention a serious problem. The mental health of employees is another challenge for many companies. It is clear that organizations dealing with these issues efficiently will come out on top in the days to come, while those who resist these changes will fall behind.

How is Robert Half helping its clients address these challenges? Robert Half helps companies find top talent. Our talent pool consists of millions of highly skilled professionals across a range of specializations capable of working from anywhere. Robert Half also leverages many technology solutions to access necessary data and applications of employees and navigate the challenges of the modern-day workforce.

Robert Half is an organization that keeps track of all these changes, and we align our processes and internal operations to efficiently address them. Robert Half also offers consulting services to our clients on a day-to-day basis to take maximum advantage of the opportunities and mitigate the hiring challenges effectively. As we have extensive experience in handling diverse business cases, we can come up with perfect solutions to address a client’s requirements. We have collaborated with thousands of employers, which helped us understand how they look at various problems. For instance, we have helped many companies build hybrid schedules, and we bring that experience when a client needs help with setting up a schedule and establishing effective communication strategies for their remote and in-office employees.

How does Robert Half hire an experienced executive under a stringent time frame?

Robert Half employs a customized search process while conducting an executive search for our clients. We kick off the process by conducting extensive research to build a profile of the client’s ideal executive. The next stage is candidate development, where we come up with a pool of custom-matched executive talent. Following this, our clients can conduct interviews with select candidates. They can also make the final selection, and we manage the recruitment and negotiation on behalf of the client. In essence, we act like a conduit that facilitates our clients’ hiring requirements.

What does the future look like for Robert Half?

We continue to work diligently with our clients and help them build superior leadership teams. We advise our clients to keep their entire hiring process transparent and flexible to bring positive hiring outcomes, and they can accomplish this by communicating extensively with employees. We noticed that clients who followed this philosophy performed better than clients who rejected it. For that reason, we will continue to share the same philosophy in the days to come.