Recruiting top talent: Another way to contribute

Abstract

34 Nurse Leader February 2008 Have you ever encouraged someone to go into nursing by emphasizing all the options the profession has to offer? If so, you probably mentioned the wide range of clinical specialties, the variety of work settings, and the array of work schedules. You might have also mentioned teaching nursing or doing nursing research, but chances are you didn’t mention being a nursing executive search consultant. When I entered the world of healthcare nearly four decades ago, I didn’t give it a thought, but then again, I doubt many people in healthcare had even heard of it at that time. According to The Amrop Hever Group1, “Executive Search emerged about 60 years ago as a new way to proactively recruit senior managers and executives. The majority of its early practitioners came from management consulting or industry. Their specific business knowledge and client management experience allowed these consultants to understand and relate to the strategic goals of their clients. Quite often clients would hire these management consultants in an executive capacity to implement newly developed strategies or ask them to recommend appropriate senior executives to do so. Eventually, recommending appropriate executives became the exclusive focus of a small number of consultants who, by adding structured research to their own networking, became the pioneers of Executive Search.”