Recruiting Senior Talent

Attracting and hiring top candidates for senior roles is a tremendous challenge across all industries. Historically, employers relied on executive search firms to fill these positions, but the Internet has considerably changed the overall recruitment landscape. Most talent acquisition today is done online.

This study took into account 619 senior hires made across more than 30 medium and large companies in Asia Pacific and the Middle East, operating within a wide selection of sectors including retail, construction, banking, transport and telecommunications, over a 15-month period, with the aim of understanding where these candidates originated from.

The vacancies ranged from senior roles such as Director of Marketing, Financial Controller and Head of IT, to executive management positions such as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Operating Officer. A total of 350,174 candidates applied for those 619 positions.

All the focus companies involved have a solid online recruitment strategy that includes a dedicated career website and an enterprise recruitment system, allowing them to track applications throughout the hiring process.

Key findings

• Senior professionals are twice as likely to apply online than any other type of candidate
• 38% of senior hires originate from the employers' career website
• 22% of senior recruits come from the company's talent pool
• Talent pools are the fastest way of recruiting senior professionals
• Senior candidates who result from professional networking have a 37% probability of getting hired