6 Steps For Recruiting Executives The Right Way To Create Maximum Impact
Recruiting executives often feel like a daunting task. After all, these leaders can make or break your company.
Here are the six most important steps when it comes to hiring an executive. These will help ensure you hire the best person for the job, ultimately leading to better decision-making, corporate culture, and financial results
Step 1: Discuss With The Experts
While you may be a founder or executive yourself, it’s critical to?speak with people currently in the open position or those who’ve hired for it in the past.?Even if you have some experience with the executive position you’re hiring for, input from others can help you make stronger decisions.
Let’s say you’re looking to bring on a CFO. Your best course of action is to tap into your network and seek the input of current CFOs or people who’ve previously hired them. Ask questions such as these:
Chatting with these people before beginning the process of recruiting executives is informative and sets the stage for each step to follow.
Step 2: Figure Out Your Ideal Candidate
Now that there’s a foundation for how to begin recruiting executives, it’s time to define your ideal candidate.?
You’ll want to sit down with the existing leadership team and decide on ideal attributes for this future team member.?Here are the?four main categories?of executive attributes with some examples:
Consider what traits you’d like to see in your ideal candidate as they pertain to these four categories.?
Need help deciding??We’ve written an entire piece on the ten most crucial?executive leadership traits.
Step 3: Tap Into Leadership’s Networks
You’ve figured out what your ideal candidate looks like, but now it’s time to source some. Recruiting executives is similar to recruiting for other roles in that employee referrals (in this case, from your fellow leadership team) can produce some of your best hires.
As part of your executive recruiting strategies, engage your leadership team and ask them to tap into their networks.?Figure out everyone involved in your organization who may have people in their network that could suit this new position.?This can include advisors, board members, investors, and more.
Once you’ve figured out who to engage, come up with at least three convincing reasons for them to help. Otherwise, they may not be inclined to assist. These reasons should include the impact the new hire will have on the company, such as how they’ll grow the company, decrease pain points, and so on.
Everyone’s busy, especially leaders. You’ll need to make it as easy as possible for them to open their networks to you. To do this, minimize the amount of work they’ll need to do by?offering to comb through their networks for them.?
If someone doesn’t want to open their network for you to do the work, give them?step-by-step instructions on how to reach out to potential candidates. This can include:
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Tapping into your current leadership’s networks is a huge part of recruiting executives the right way.
Step 4: Consider An Executive Search Firm
While recruiting executives can be done using only your leadership team’s network, this may not produce the?best?results possible. It may also take too much time.
When hiring for the executive or VP level, an executive search firm is likely the best way to go, particularly when time is of the essence. These search firms specialize in finding the best leader for your company and have far more extensive networks.
If you decide to move forward with an executive search firm, choose one based on experience in the industry and how well you communicate with the firm. Since these firms will be your partner in the hiring process, you want to work with one you get along with.
On the hunt for the perfect executive search firm??Look no further than Jennings Executive. With over two decades of experience recruiting executives from a select few niches, Jennings Exec is sure to find the best candidate for your open leadership position.?Learn more?today.?
Step 5: Choose Your Hiring Committee
Great! You’ve sourced candidates and have them on lock. The next part of the executive recruitment process is to select an appropriate hiring committee. There’s a sweet spot when it comes to this group of people; you want enough perspectives to offer valuable insight, but not so many that it causes gridlock.
Aim for a hiring committee of 4-7 people. Choose individuals who can accurately assess those traits which you previously deemed critical in your new leader. Refer back to step 2.
While you can leave the responsibilities of committee members more open-ended, it may be more beneficial to assign specific competencies you want each member to dig into. If you choose to assign these when recruiting executives, do so based on the hiring member’s experiences and match accordingly.
Step 6: Properly Evaluate & Select Candidates
Particularly when recruiting executives, you’ll want a stringent method for evaluating and choosing potential hires.?Diversity in finance?and many other industries is lacking significantly at the c-suite level, primarily driven by conscious and unconscious bias during the hiring process. This is one major reason why you must come up with a candidate evaluation and selection system beforehand.
To do so, come up with the following ahead of time:
Final Word
Using the six steps outlined above, you’ll be well on your way to recruiting executives the right way. All six methods will help you implement executive recruiting best practices to ensure you hire the right person for your open leadership position.
If you’re still looking for an executive search firm, check us out!?Jennings Executive?would love to help you hire the perfect executive for your company.
Husband, Father, Recruiter, Proud Buffalonian
2 年Not easy, but a good last name helps ??
If you have more ambition than cash then contact me
2 年It's step 2 for me: Figure Out Your Ideal Candidate Jon Jennings You need to have an idea of what you want before you go shopping OR you can waste a lot of time interviewing people who will never fit your requirements.
Building Investment Clubs * Providing Investment Education * Shares * Share Options * 200 Active Mastermind Groups * Investment Workshops *Operating in 50 countries worldwide since 1998
2 年What you've shared here is incredibly useful and supportive; thanks a lot, Jon.
Collaboration and Execution Expert | ExO Coach and Ambassador | Delivering concentrated value with tangible outcomes in 90 days or less, deploying the least amount of resource for maximum impact
2 年This is very valuable content Jon, and you explained it very well. Thank you for sharing!
AI & Tech Product Manager | Delivering 2x Growth + 40% Cost Reduction | Product Strategy for AI-First Companies
2 年Recruiting executives is not easy. You need to find the most suitable manager to be brought into the open leadership position. Thanks for your guidance on this. I loved the article and found the six steps you mentioned very useful.