The field of headhunting is a very challenging one when it comes to finding and recruiting top sales and marketing talentwhether they be executive, mid-level, sales management, marketing management or front line sales and marketing producers. Searching for these types of top candidates is no easy task.

If your company is trying to find the best, make sure to bring in an experienced sales and marketing recruiter who can help you. They are worth their weight in gold, and their fees are easily justified. By outsourcing to a search firm, you can reduce your hiring time, improve the process and avoid the risk of mis-hires.

I see lots of companies that have made mis-hires over the years, and its not because they havent done their best to find good candidates. The problem is that their best is just not good enough. Often times, Presidents or Chief Operating Officers or VPs of Sales rely on the same tools as everybody else to try to find candidates, which includes posting ads on Monster.com, Careerbuilder or one of the other major career sites. This just doesnt cut it anymore.

If you want to find the best talent, deploy the best talent to find those people for you, which means hiring an executive search or retained recruiting firm that specializes in sales and marketing. If you dont, youre doing yourself a disservice. Now you may ask yourself, why should I spend money to go find candidates when I can just find them myself by posting on the internet? The fact is, the best people, the top talented people are not looking for jobs, they already have jobs. So theyre not going to see your job psoting because theyre not actively looking at online listings. Recognize that those talented people are already working, happy and making good money in a job somewhere else. Youve got to go find them, and the best way to do this is through a professional recruiting firm.

Its very costly, very time consuming and very difficult for somebody whos running a business to go spend time to actually identify, locate, find and extract potential employees from competitors or other companies. This is where an executive search firm ads real value.

The fees involved can run between 25 and 35% of a persons total compensation in the first year, which is a lot of money. Youd ask yourself, how can I justify that? The answer is, how can you justify not spending that money if it makes a difference between hiring an A player and hiring a C player? An executive recruiting firm possesses the ability to find top talent and put them to work for you.

Think about how the following would impact on business: hiring a person into a position to sell $1 million in annual revenue, versus hiring a top performer who can achieve $3 million worth of annual revenue. If you hire a recruiter who can bring this kind of incremental revenue to your company by finding top talent, why wouldnt you pay for the best? Theyre going to pay for themselves over and over and over again throughout the years.

So think about hiring a sales and marketing recruiting company, or a sales and marketing staffing company as a strategic vehicle towards growing your business.