A pendulum in the business of talent acquisition swung wide over the last decade. With the advent of IT innovations, emphasis on seeking the best available professionals was shown a back seat to sourcing large numbers of job seekers, and populating and harvesting immense candidate databases. What used to be the most time consuming aspect of search became less challenging. That has given false comfort to hiring executives, as sourcing candidates represented the end game of talent acquisition. What is forgotten is that sourcing is simply one aspect of talent acquisition.

What has atrophied is the application of judgment. Search partners at even the most esteemed firms rely on researchers to assemble lists, which the partners then present to clients to gauge interest level before prospective candidates have been contacted or vetted against requirements. Internal recruiters, managing dozens of concurrent openings, must speed read resumes and present subsets to overworked hiring executives who must do their own qualifying. In both scenarios, the “talent acquisition professionals” often have scarce time to offer qualified judgmental value, leaving all risk to fall upon an executive with scarce time to perform his or her primary job.

With all due respect to these welcome IT innovations – yes, we use them too – the most efficient and innovative business processes in talent acquisition are only as valuable as the quality of their outcomes. In the absence of measured control, velocity alone too often leads to negative results. That is a truth in physics, in sports, in societies and in business. In search, the control we use is human judgment.

We formed Diligent Partners to reintroduce the value proposition that diligence in search matters. The world’s best run companies are led by intelligent, driven executives who care about the quality of their work. Diligence is a mindset, an ethos and a core value of high performers who apply that work ethic every day.

Diligence can be taught as a process and applied as a discipline, but it is strongest if it beats in people’s hearts. We take the time to apply that process in order to qualify every candidate we present, and we present just a select few who themselves apply the same diligent mindset to their work.

We perform search as it used to be. We straddle the Old World of recruiting in terms of high touch in-person interviews, while leveraging all the newest technologies and techniques of today. We believe our approach reintroduces the value for which this profession was once known.

Our clients agree.