When the right candidate doesn't come from where the partner expects

At the start of a search, the most important question for us is often why it stalled before. It frequently turns out that the problem was not the candidates, but that the sourcing started from too narrow a place.

During the search we work it out together with the partner: the right background is not necessarily available from a single segment. A candidate from the chemical industry does not have to come only from chemicals, nor only from a manufacturer or only from a trading company.

In one of our current searches the partner expected the candidate to come from a distributor, but together we also looked at what happens if we bring someone from a manufacturer: a professional who works directly with the very products the distributors sell. Many manufacturers also sell directly, so the two directions do not exclude each other.

So during the search we work together to:

• understand why the search stalled before,
• widen the sourcing to adjacent industries and candidates with similar backgrounds,
• and help the partner see that the right person can come from elsewhere.

Partners sometimes view candidate sourcing with tunnel vision. One of the real values of a search is that we widen that pool together.