One top employee can often produce 2 to 3 times as much as one average employee. In creative positions, like sales or engineering, one top employee can be worth millions of dollars more to their employers. How do you find these top people? They are not looking at ads in the paper or sending their resumes to prospective employers. These super stars usually are currently working. To find these people, people in their industry need to be contacted and asked for referrals. Then, someone needs to contact them directly and convince them to look at other opportunites. It may take several hundred man hours to find each person, but this is still one of the best ways to find the top candidates. An alternative to identifying and screening the top candidates yourself, is to use a professional placement agency that is already doing the same effort for several other customers. You will only pay them if you hire one of their candidates. You will save the hundreds of hours of searcing on your own and have a larger number of prescreened qualified candidates to choose from.
