From Recruiter To CEO: Every CEO Was A Recruiter Once | POINT BY POINT

What's the most important thing every CEO has to be good at?

The interesting fact is, there is no subject in school that teaches us this. For a long time, there was no documentation or books about it, even specialized people were missing. 

It was complicated to master this skill.

Imagine an orchestra, the leader of the group is called a conductor. The conductor is the only person in the whole group that produces no sound throughout the event. He's there to present the result, share his value, and lead a great show.

Leadership in a simple manner comes down to two things. The capacity to put together the best team you possibly can, and to help those people to reach their full potential.

Every successful CEO should consider himself or herself a good recruiter first. Being able to put together a team and leading it in the right direction year by year, is a great mastery to have.

But, how many CEOs are in fact, great recruiters? They didn't have the resources to learn until a few years now. Truth is, they had no idea. They found themselves hiring new good people for the role with little to no knowledge of what a good talent was. So they made mistakes.

These mistakes influence quite a lot outside of the money perspective. The financial status is damaged and the costs are very high to replace a mismatched talent, so avoiding this scenario is mandatory. But other than that, it impacted the organizational culture, and how clients look at it. It impacts CEOs' happiness, more stress on their shoulders providing from bad hiring. A bad choice of talent doesn't mean a bad person, so you're not impacting the team and the organization but the talent as well by slowing their growth.

So how do we solve these situations?

The first thing they did in order to hire the right people, was to hire themselves. If they were analytical, candidates had to be analytical; they were proactive, the candidate had to be proactive; they were competitive, the candidate had to be so. Might not be the best idea after all. So they tried to step it up and hire people that know everything. The catch is, you don't want a person who knows everything, you want the best person at one specific thing to build a team of great talents.

It started to work and it felt like everything caught up to the expectations, but now they've created a team so good, the group didn't need a leader or a CEO anymore. The pressure was too high and how would the CEOs teach the experts?

So what CEOs did do? They hired people less good than themselves. As hires Bs, Bs hires Cs, Cs hired Ds, and so on. It turns out the work is not as productive and the quality is on the lower side with a deadline knocking on the door. Hiring people with less knowledge was not a good idea.

So, after all these fails and time waste, how do they do it?

CEOs gave up. The idea of a great team became this quick hire session. They hopped into an interview, listened to the candidate for three to five minutes, and decided whether it was a good fit. For the rest of the 45 minutes, leaders tried to convince themselves with certain confirmation points about their decision.

The outcome is still unsatisfying, and the product isn't getting the traction it needs to be successful.

Finally, in the end, they built a procedure. A process with different levels to determine the best candidates for the specific roles. Back in the day was the classical face-to-face interview - offer; now is CV screening - phone/online interview - technical interview (if so) - additional interview (clients and such) - offer; shortly are the algorithms, doing the same as humans but faster and more precise to determine the best candidates fitting with the company.

Is this the best practice to hire the best candidates? Currently yes, don't know about the future.

The process I have just described happened over tens of years, and fortunately for us, the results are getting better and better, and talents are placed in great environments where great leaders healthily exploit their full potential.

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Thanks,

Cristi