The Percentage of Candidates Shared in TE is . . .

Membership in Top Echelon Network is unique to every recruiter that’s a member of the Network. That’s because each recruiter uses the Network in a different way with their candidates and job orders, incorporating it into their firm’s business model in whatever fashion makes sense.

This includes their preference in sharing candidates with the rest of the Membership. It’s no surprise that some recruiters like to share more than other recruiters. Part of that might have to do with which recruiters are exporters (candidate recruiters) and which ones are importers (job order recruiters).

In fact, some Network members deal ONLY with candidates and let their trading partners deal with companies and provide the job orders. To some recruiters, that’s lunacy. To others, it’s a viable—and profitable—business model.

With that in mind, how many candidates do members share with the rest of the Network? To find out, we polled the membership by posing the question below:

What percentage of your firm’s candidates are posted on the Network?

Results:

The choice of answers that we provided is listed below, along with the percentage of recruiters that selected each one:

• None of them — 31.0%
• Between 1% and 25% — 50.0%
• Between 26% and 50% — 4.0%
• Between 51% and 75% — 3.0%
• Between 76% and 99% — 7.0%
• All of them — 5.0%

Summary:

As you can see, half of those who participated in the poll (50%) share “between 1% and 25%” of their candidates. That is apparently the “sweet spot” in the Network.

At the extremes, 31% of respondents don’t share any, and that could be for a variety of reasons. Some recruiters simply email the members of their core group instead. Still others are strictly importers.

At the other end of the spectrum, 5% of poll participants share ALL of their candidates with the rest of the membership. In between, only 14% share between 26% and 99%.

Analysis and Conclusion:

It’s true that the more candidates you share with the Network, the more successful you’ll be in the Network. The results of this poll clearly illustrate, though, that recruiters in Top Echelon do NOT share the majority of their candidates in TE.

Obviously, recruiters would like to make a full-fee placement if they can, and who can blame them for that? However, members are still enjoying considerable success with the candidates they ARE sharing.

As I mentioned above, everybody runs their recruiting firm differently, and everybody uses Top Echelon differently. However, sharing is the founding principle upon which the Network was built. The more you share, the more you’ll bill. With nearly 30 years of numbers to back us up, sharing is more than just good manners . . . it’s good business.