As the Managing Director of your business, you’re going to want to work with only the best and brightest individuals. Your leadership team is the backbone of your company, and as such it’s vitally important that this team consists of the best talent available.
Filling a leadership role can be difficult especially when you’re looking for a quality candidate who matches your business culture perfectly. There are a number of strategies you can employ in order to increase your chances of finding the right person for your business and enhance your recruitment process when searching for your ideal person.
Let’s take a look at 8 core strategies you should keep in mind as you begin your search.
1 - Adopt a Multiple Interview Structure
Finding the right person for the leadership role can be challenging and take time. The structure of your interview process for senior management is critical to recruitment success, so be sure to give it thorough consideration. It’s almost always useful to conduct multiple interviews per candidate in order to get the best idea of their abilities and suitability for role.
These interviews can be structured in whatever manner you like, however it’s a good idea to conduct these interviews in different formats when possible. For example, you may wish to structure the initial interview as a more informal discussion or meeting in order to get an idea of the candidate’s personality. After this you can move on to more formal, traditional interviews which can help you properly gauge your candidate’s ability and expertise.
2 - Use Competency Tests
Competency tests are a great method of testing your candidate’s confidence, knowledge, and ability to perform in your leadership role. These tests can be conducted in one of the interviews, usually the second interview. The format in which they take place is your decision, as there are many ways of conducting these tests, and there are different things to test for.
This test may take the form of a standard interview; simple questions and answers regarding the responsibilities of the role. However you may also choose to utilise role-playing exercises to put your candidate into a managerial situation to test their situational and reactive decision making ability. This is useful as it's slightly more practical than a question and answer format alone.
You may also consider using a written test format. For example, you may allocate an hour of interview time to allow the candidate to complete a test on their own, perhaps a multiple choice, questions and answer, or an essay-based written test. This method allows your candidate a bit more time to think about their answers, which allows for more detail and better elocution. It also allows you to easily return to their answer, reflect upon what they wrote, and compare it to other candidates.
3 - Conduct Psychometric Profiling
You may or may not have utilised psychometric profiling in your shortlisting process previously, however if you haven’t you may be missing out. Psychometric profiling can allow you to gather a good deal of highly-useful and applicable information about the candidates for your position.
The role of a director calls for the best candidates possible, not just in terms of experience but also in personality. By using psychometric profiling you can identify what type of person your candidate is, how they work best, who they work best with, and what environment they work best in. This means that profiling can help tell you whether your candidate is a good fit for the senior management of your business specifically.
Some recruitment and talent search agencies such as ourselves at Executive Headhunters EMA Partners utilise psychometric profiling on candidates to form the best idea of their personality and how they work. This ensures clients know as much as possible about the candidates that are being submitted to them.
4 - Perform a Broad Talent Search
An easy mistake to make when conducting the talent search is to be too specific in your search. Many businesses performing in-house recruitment focus too much on finding candidates from very specific sectors, areas, and backgrounds in order to save time and effort. In the process they cut themselves off from many highly-talented and sometimes ideal candidates. Often by considering related sectors or roles you can discover a hidden pool of talent you weren’t even aware of or didn’t realise were suitable for your opportunity. This is why considering where to look during the search process is so important.
Searching in different fields, sectors, and roles may be more time consuming, but it may also find talent you didn’t even realise were perfect for your business and for your opportunity.
5 - Respect and Nurture Your Candidates
It’s all too easy to think that approaching candidates is as simple as ‘interested / not interested’. Especially when you’re emailing, messaging, and ringing hundreds of candidates, the urge to save time and move on can take over. After all, you may ask, why waste time on candidates who aren’t immediately interested? Well, put simply, by doing this you may be losing out on some of the best talent around. Most of the time, the very best talent in your industry will be happy in their current role, and their employer will be desperate to keep them, so encouraging them to move can sometimes be extremely difficult.
This is why respecting and nurturing your candidates is so important.
Here at Executive Headhunters EMA Partners, we understand this. One of the benefits of our service is that we place a lot of focus onto nurturing high-quality candidates who may not appear interested or viable immediately. Through doing this, we have successfully managed to attract top-level talent to our client’s opportunity, which could not have been done without nurturing them over a longer period of time.
Nurturing candidates and respecting them also comes with the additional benefit of creating prospects for future opportunities. For example, by getting on good terms with candidates and familiarising them with your business, you may increase the chances of them being a viable option for any future opportunities.
Remember, just because a candidate isn’t interested in your business now, that doesn’t mean they won’t be interested in the future. You just need to give them reason to be.
6 – Do They Fit in With Your Company Culture?
Remember that a candidate’s suitability is determined by more than experience and skill set alone. Though it can be easy to base your recruitment decision entirely on these factors, it’s important not to neglect your business environment and the effect that this has on the success of newly integrated leadership appointments.
Hiring a new individual who is a great fit for your company culture, and who matches well with your current employees and leadership team is vital. This not only eases the hire’s initial integration into the company, speeding up the onboarding process, but also ensures easier development as their involvement in your business continues. Unfortunately, hiring a new leader who isn’t the right fit for your company culture and hoping they eventually integrate runs the risk of failure. The hire may end up leaving if they don’t fit properly.
Also consider the effect bringing in a new manager will have on your current employees. It’s not just the new leader that needs to integrate, your current staff also need to work well with the new hire. You want to make sure your hired candidate doesn’t cause disruption in your team. Engaging employees in the workplace is important so find a candidate who fits well into your current team and culture. One of the ways of helping to ensure you hire someone who will excel working with the current team is by using personality psychometric tests, as part of a detailed, multi-stage interview process.
Implementing an Executive Onboarding Programme can also help ensure a smooth and successful integration of the new employee. Nearly half of all leadership transitions fail within the first two years, with 70% of those failures being attributed to organisation’s culture and politics as the primary reason for failure. Putting in place a strong Executive Onboarding programme can help avoid such a costly failure.
7 – Implement Talent Pipelining & Leadership Development
This option is more long term than the others, and requires some planning, but is one of the most effective ways of filling senior roles within your business.
Talent Pipelining is the process of creating a reliable, healthy pipeline of prospects for the future of your business - both internal current employees as well as external prospective employees.
By nurturing and developing your current employees, you’re helping to provide them with the right skills and experience to be moulded into leadership material. Similarly, external talent nurturing can keep you engaged with the best performing talent in the market for when they are ready to make a change.
This can make filling future positions such as this much easier as you'll have immediate access to a pool of talent that know your business well and have been primed specifically for this opportunity.
However training and development doesn’t stop once the position has been filled. Leadership development is still important once the individual has taken the role.
We offer a range of leadership development and assessment services at Executive Headhunters EMA Partners.
8 – Consider Headhunters & Executive Search Firms
Filling a leadership role on your own usually isn’t a viable option if you want to make sure you are appointing the best person for your business. There may be a variety of reasons for this. Maybe you can’t find anybody that fits with your business culture. Perhaps there is simply a shortage of senior talent in your industry that are willing to move. In cases like this, you may want to consider headhunting or executive search firms. Businesses such as Executive Headhunters EMA Partners can help you find and recruit some of the best talent around. We perform completely bespoke talent searches for any role in any sector, including senior manager and director positions.
Executive search firms have a lot of quality experience, expertise, and resources that they utilise during the search process in order to find you the best and most ideal candidates for your position. Utilising headhunters can save you a great deal of time and money as well as provide you with a better quality of candidates and future prospects.
Finding the Right Leader
Finding the right candidate for a leadership role, the individual who fits your company perfectly, can be a long and difficult task. But it doesn’t always have to be.
By taking these factors into account during your searching and interviewing process, you can greatly enhance the success of your search, and the success of the person you take on.
