Using recruiters to hire top sales and management talent doesn’t work. If your company wants to truly hire the best talent, you must institute a recruiting program that is hiring manager directed and that doesn’t rely on a recruiter.

You are, of course, right. The Achilles Heel of the program isn’t that it doesn’t work. It works tremendously well. It’s the resistance by the hiring manager who fears having to invest lots of time into the process.

Strangely enough, my experience has been that the resistance doesn’t come from the CEO who must commit his or her time to finding and courting the top executive vice president of finance or the executive vp of marketing. The real resistance comes from the branch and regional levels and the department heads.

The further down the ladder, the more resistance. That’s to be expected to some degree. The CEO may only have half a dozen top candidates to court where a regional manager may have 15 or more top salespeople to identify and court within his region. As the number of potential top candidates increases, resistance increases due to the perception of how much time will have to be invested.

In reality, the time commitment isn’t arduous—after the program is setup.

The biggest time commitment is at the beginning of the process when the candidates must be identified—both known and unknown candidates. Known candidates are easy. Unknown top candidates obviously take some detective work—networking with acquaintances, association executives, and others.

Once the candidates are identified, they must be contacted. Realistically, if a regional manager identifies say 17 top sales candidates he or she will probably eliminate a few through the initial phone conversation. They’ll determine the personality doesn’t fit, they can’t work with the person for one reason or another, the individual tells them in no uncertain terms to not call them again, or something else doesn’t click in the conversation.

After their conversations, say they have a dozen left. Now comes the getting to know the people and courting period. This involves phone conversations, emails, possibly an occasional lunch meeting. If the regional manager wants to keep in touch with each potential candidate say once every 60 days, a series or emails, letters and phone conversations with an occasional meeting would work well.

The regional manager above may have to invest 20 to 30 hours in the program during the first 30 to 60 days. But once the potential candidates have been identified and the initial contacts made, the time investment would probably be no more than 6 to 10 hours a month—and that includes continuing to search for other top salespeople that he or she hadn’t discovered during their initial search.

There is no doubt that the program costs time. The company will pay in either the time they commit or the money they pay a recruiter. The difference is in the quality of the people the can bring on board. And since few companies would institute this program for every position within the company, the number of individuals involved in a recruiting effort would not be great.

The decision they must make is which is more valuable in the long-term. A few will commit themselves to creating a serious recruiting program and invest he human resources, most will continue as they are, investing their dollars instead of their time and settling for what a recruiter can come up with. In the long-term, the advantage goes to those few who commit themselves to finding, wooing and hiring a strong group of top performers.