Why Not Just Post The Job?

If you’ve ever tried to fill a critical role on your team, you know the drill. You throw the posting up on LinkedIn, Indeed, or a half dozen other platforms and then you wait. Applications trickle in — some promising, many off-target. Meanwhile, your team is stretched thin, you’re covering for the missing hire, and the calendar doesn’t stop.

It’s frustrating. On paper, it looks simple: more platforms, more candidates, more options. In practice, it often feels like a slog through noise.

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When Posting Works Just Fine 

There are plenty of cases where posting or leaning on your HR team works well:

High-volume, repeatable roles: If you’re filling sales development reps or customer support associates, posting works. Internal recruiters get so many repetitions of these searches each year that they build networks, know what to look for, and can spot a fit quickly.

Well-branded employers: If you’re Google, Amazon, or a Fortune 100 company, you’ll never struggle for applicants. Post a role and you’ll get hundreds, sometimes thousands, of resumes overnight. The challenge shifts from attraction to filtering. These companies also have large internal recruiting teams with function-specific specialists. Over time, they build real expertise because they get the reps.

Early-career positions: Entry-level candidates are actively searching online, and they’ll find you without much friction. Postings reliably bring in strong applicant flow, which makes early-career roles some of the easiest to fill internally.

In these situations, posting is efficient and effective.

<h2> When External Recruiters Add Value <h2> 

Posting breaks down once you move into roles that are harder to fill:

Most of the best candidates aren’t looking: The strongest talent is usually buried in project work or quietly advancing in their current companies. They won’t see a posting — they need to be found and approached.

Strategic impact roles: Hiring someone to set or optimize pricing, lead finance, or run product strategy isn’t just another seat on the org chart. Done well, it shapes revenue growth, competitive positioning, even investor confidence. Get it wrong, and the ripple effects are expensive.

Scarce talent markets: When the pool is shallow, inbound isn’t enough. You need someone actively mapping the market, reaching into networks, and persuading the right people to consider the opportunity.

External recruiters succeed here because they already have networks in the areas they specialize in. Those existing relationships mean they can get engagement from candidates who wouldn’t respond to a posting or an unfamiliar outreach. Where inbound delivers volume, a recruiter’s network delivers access.

This is where external recruiters add measurable ROI:

• Time-to-hire. A strong recruiter can cut weeks or months off the process by going directly to qualified candidates.
• Leadership focus. Every hour a VP or C-suite leader spends screening resumes is an hour not spent on strategy.
• Quality and retention. A mis-hire at the leadership level can cost 2–3x salary once you factor disruption, replacement, and lost opportunity. Specialists lower that risk.
• Revenue impact. A great pricing leader, for example, can unlock 1–3% of topline revenue. For a $500M business, that’s $5M–$15M a year.

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Why Pricing Roles Are Uniquely Challenging

Pricing is a tough search for both internal and external recruiters.

Inside companies, internal recruiters are often generalists by design. They handle finance hires one week, product managers the next, and maybe a customer success lead after that. It’s not a lack of skill; it’s the nature of the job.

They may also point to a successful pricing hire from a few years ago as evidence they can run the search again. But that’s where pricing is different: roles evolve quickly. A Controller hired three years ago looks almost identical to one hired today. A Head of Pricing role, by contrast, often changes shape as the business matures. What the company needs now may be very different from what it needed then. That lack of consistency makes it hard for internal recruiters to rely on past searches to guide future ones — the benchmarks shift too fast.

Even external recruiters face challenges: Even the largest recruiting firms don’t get enough repetitions in pricing to build real depth. Demand for pricing talent is already low-volume, and to complicate matters, it’s fragmented — pricing can report into Finance, Marketing, Sales, or Strategy depending on the company. That means searches get spread thin across different recruiter desks instead of building concentrated expertise. The result is that even experienced recruiters often lack the pattern recognition, benchmarks, and network to consistently deliver great pricing hires.

Layer on the stakes. Pricing decisions influence growth, margins, competitive positioning, even investor confidence. And the pool of true pricing talent is shallow. Combine rarity, role evolution, and strategic impact, and it’s clear why pricing searches are uniquely difficult to get right.

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How JES Fills The Gap

This is where Jennings Executive Search makes the difference. We spend every day in this niche, so we bring the repetitions, relationships, and market context that generalist recruiters simply don’t have. Our network is built specifically around pricing and commercial strategy roles, which means we already know the right conversations to start — and can engage candidates who wouldn’t

otherwise take a call.

Just as important, we have people on staff who have worked in pricing roles themselves. That firsthand experience helps us understand the nuances of what clients really need and what candidates are looking for. It builds credibility on both sides of the search and ensures better alignment from the very first conversation.

And through Profit Academy, we add another layer of value: screening for pricing aptitude that isn’t always obvious on a résumé and giving early-career talent the training to ramp quickly. That combination of evaluation and preparation helps ensure every hire — from junior analysts to senior leaders — is equipped to deliver impact.

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So How Do You Decide? 

It boils down to this:

• If your role is high-volume, entry-level, or easily filled by inbound — post it.
•  If the role is strategic, scarce, or high-stakes — external recruiters add value.
• And if the role is in pricing — it’s always high-stakes. You need a specialist who lives in this market every day.

The right talent changes everything. The fastest way to that talent is working with a partner who understands pricing from the inside, speaks the language of both clients and candidates, and knows how to align the role with what the business truly needs.

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