Don’t know what you want, but you will when you see it.

Have you been in the position where you have found yourself thinking or saying, “I am not sure what I want but I will know when I see it”? This is just as true in recruitment as it is in choosing a house. And in the same way you’ll have some fixed parameters that you don’t want to shift on, and some other parameters that you just haven’t defined yet. But when looking for talent, perhaps due to workload, changing business drivers and the wider political environment, we don’t always know all the parameters. Instead of waiting, now is the time to use your recruiter to provide options to help you codify your thinking and clarify your needs.

Recently, I was working with a consulting practice that wanted to expand their footprint by being able to offer another set of capabilities to their clients. It was close enough to their other services to be credible, however not close enough to use an internal person to lead this new offering. They knew they need to look externally, but they knew the area was vast and that they could easily pick the wrong approach. They asked for help.

We agreed quickly that we would achieve better a candidate pool if we could search for the position of partner. But that was the only decision we reached during this incredibly short briefing meeting. The first step was to test the different type of approaches to growing capability in this area, to help the consulting practice determine the best business route. They knew that being specific would be key to the firm’s success, but at this stage where to focus was unknown.

By approaching the market with a general company pitch, explaining the recent history and ‘story’ of the firm and that we were providing an opportunity to join the business in a leadership capacity, with the investment and backing to build a new practice from scratch, we sparked a lot of initial interest. We worked to set up a number of conversations about the “art of the possible” for the firm’s evolution. All the candidates could perform a leadership role, all of them knew the offering in question, none of the approaches to tackle the new service were similar.

Our initial objective helped the firm to see which approaches they liked and which specific offering would work best for the business. We then revised and defined the search to ensure we had the best specific candidates to fit this brief. We ran this search and hired the right candidate.

What would have happened if we had gone to market with a full JD to start with? The firm would have ended up hiring a person who had the right chemistry for the business, but not necessarily the right approach.

The hiring team learnt as much from the people they didn’t hire as to the ones they did.