Nine Leadership Hiring Mistakes CEOs Make

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Hiring is tough. Hiring leaders is even tougher. Hiring bad-fit leaders is the tougherest (added accentuation there, and intentional!).

Here are 9 hiring mistakes I see being made by CEOs and companies regularly…in no particular order.

Hiring Mistake 1 - Hiring the player/coach

The decision to hire a leader is often met with budgetary constraints. Growing companies want a leader that can build the team AND do the contributor work. It just doesn’t work.

Solution: Stretch your dollar and resources and don’t hire a leader until 100% of their time can be dedicated to coaching their team.

Hiring Mistake 2 – Hiring the leader and getting out of the?way

Often the decision to hire a leader is so the CEO can spend more time on other things. But getting out of the way doesn’t empower your leader, it cripples them.

Solution: Be engaged during onboarding and stay engaged afterward.

Hiring Mistake 3 - Not resourcing?the leadership position properly

Leaders need resources to help get the jobs done. This includes things like technology, professional development, staff, consultants, training, memberships, etc.

Solution: I tend to want to look at 12 months ahead of a leadership hire and about 2x-3x the leader's salary (not including staff growth) over the first 12 months.

Hiring Mistake 4 – Misaligning title with responsibility

Similar to the player/coach role, but too often a VP or C suite title is given when the core work is leading front-line employee teams. A VP or C suite shouldn’t be doing individual contributor work. It diminishes the importance of the role and creates a career path that’s limiting.

Solution: Title the roles properly that align with the core responsibilities. If you are hiring a leader to lead front-line employees, they are a manager or director.

Hiring Mistake 5 - Hiring the best-performing contributor to lead a?team

The pre-requisite for a leadership position isn’t goal attainment in their contributor role. Core competencies from leaders require the ability to coach the team, train the team, and support the team. Not be the doer who gets the job done.

Solution: Hire on competency, not on performance. This should be true in every position, but when making the leap from contributor to leader, there are far heavier weighted attributes and characteristics that are more important than past successes in contributor roles.

Hiring Mistake 6 - Hiring for experience

Hiring for experience often comes with higher costs, lack of coachability/change-resistant, limited perspective (counter to diversity program often resulting in bias!), and even burnout. It’s often just a way to pre-screen candidates and eliminate people easily.

Years of experience – Is 10 years of experience working for a terrible company with ineffective training and unsuccessful results better than 5 years of experience for a great company with excellent onboarding/training/coaching programs with wildly successful results?

Industry experience – Similar to the above, but what skills or competencies are gained from a candidate inside the industry? If anything, it helps speed up onboarding. I can also see some very niche (emphasis on VERY NICHE) industries or buyers that may require industry experience.

Solution: Replace years of experience and industry experience with core skills and competencies, then assess for those during the hiring process.

Hiring Mistake 7 - Lack of clarity in outcomes

It’s easy to create a basic job description with responsibilities. It’s hard to evaluate whether those responsibilities are being carried out effectively.

Solution: When you create a job description, create KPIs along with it. Even if they are rough guidelines, at least have an idea of the end in mind. What determines success in the first 90 days? First year? Are these SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals?

Hiring Mistake 8 - Using gut and intuition

Interviews are about conversations and rapport building. Good conversation, good stories, likeability, relative experiences, and the like, are all things you look for in an interview. But does likeability overpower job fit? When using gut decisions or intuition, you can quickly find yourself using confirmation bias throughout the interview.

Solution: Use a standard scorecard process that incorporates a wide degree of evaluation. Create this framework ahead of time and have everyone follow it. Outline what you want to hear from candidates, how you evaluate success, how you evaluate job fit, any assessments and outcomes you want, etc.

Hiring Mistake 9 - Not involving your team

The amount of damage that can be done when hiring a bad-fit leader can often be exponential. Leaders often interact with other leaders and teams throughout a company. Hiring leaders from the CEOs perspective only will often negatively impact the other team members who work with that leader. As a result, you want to make sure you have their buy-in during this process.

Solution: Engage other leaders (cross-functional and other C suite) and team members in the interviewing process. It’s helpful to include one or two of the direct reports of this leader as well. Share the scorecard you put together from the previous step and work with everyone to help them understand what you want in this role, what you don’t want, things to pay attention to, etc.

Conclusion

Hiring mistakes happen, the key is to reduce as much as you can and hedge your bet. The best way to hedge against bad hires is to have a good plan outlining some of the tips above.

I love a good debate and am happy to talk shop and hear other perspectives.

Ed Porter?| Fractional CRO?

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