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Why Your Executive Search Firm Needs to Take the Lead on Compensation Discussions

One of the most potentially contentious parts of marketing executive hiring is, without a doubt, compensation negotiation. A poorly managed conversation about this sensitive topic can easily spoil a great potential hire. But with a top executive search partner in your corner, it’s a discussion that can lead to mutual cooperation and excitement rather than tension and enmity.

When you have a disconnect between the employer and candidate on what’s reasonable, it is valuable to have an independent third party to help everyone find an agreeable middle ground and create a win-win situation. Here’s why:

Taking Advantage of the Experience You’re Paying for

Given the immense long-term value the right marketing leader can provide to your business, a top senior marketing recruitment partner is absolutely worth its weight in gold. As you are making the investment, doesn’t it make sense to get as much ROI from it as possible?

A Third-Party Shock Absorber

Sometimes the compensation talks can become heated and contentious even in the best of situations. Emotions run high on both sides when “just business” clashes with an individual’s livelihood and self-worth.

When you keep your marketing executive search partner involved in the discussion from beginning to end, you get constant access to a buffer and outlet for those tensions.

Thinking Beyond Marketing Executive Salary

You’re no doubt aware that compensation can mean a lot of things beyond flat salary. That includes stock options, days off, performance-based bonuses, sign-on and relocation incentives, work flexibility and more.

Your executive search firm has been in communication with both parties from the start. They should know what factors the candidate values most, and where your limits are from a budget perspective. Depending on the candidate and the state of your business, there may be far more room for wiggle room and compromise than you had realized.

How Important Is the College Degree of Your Next Marketing Executive?

We often get asked: “What kind of degree should we be expecting in candidates when we're looking for a marketing executive?” It’s a good question; a college degree can give some valuable insights into a candidate, but it’s also easy to be misled or put your focus on the wrong variable. When considering an applicant’s education record or setting degree requirements in your job description, you need to weigh a lot of factors in order to get any use of your evaluation.

First off, it’s good to remember that a college education is no guarantee of a strong candidate. If you’ve been in business long enough, you’ve no doubt encountered professionals in all kinds of vocations with a great variety of degrees that were unimpressive at their job.

Similarly, massive success in business and beyond is not gated behind a degree. History is full of successful entrepreneurs and leaders who have little or no higher education:

• 8 Hugely Successful People Who Didn't Graduate College
• The College Dropout's Hall of Fame

Still, a degree can be a good initial indicator of a professional’s qualifications. As long as it’s just one of several factors considered, there’s some value to be found in how and where an individual got their education.

Before you start considering or disregarding talent because of their level of college education, you should always evaluate another more important factor: the difference they’ve made for their employers historically. If a candidate has a long career of moving into new roles, improving themselves and driving meaningful, tangible ROI, then they should always be a consideration regardless of which graduation caps they’ve worn.

A college degree will rarely give you much insight into how good of a marketer someone is—even if the degree is in Marketing. Marketing is simply moving too fast for most institutions to keep up; if you started writing a marketing textbook today, it would probably be out of date by the time you got it published.

However, there’s more to being a great marketing executive than simply being a good marketer.

If someone is smart enough to get into and graduate from college, it indicates that they probably have a certain amount of intellectual horsepower, mental fortitude, discipline, creativity, ambition, and a love of learning. These are all key traits that almost any successful marketing executive will have in spades, and you should be looking for them during your marketing executive recruitment.

Featured Video Transcript [Top of the Page]

If you are going out to look for an executive search partner the top things you need to be looking for are most importantly they need to have expertise in the area that your searching out, right, so if I’m looking for a chief marketing officer does the person that’s going to be calling the talent understand and have marketing expertise? Have they done that in their background or have they been a recruiter all their life who’s a really good recruiter but doesn’t understand marketing because in today’s world as fast as marketing is changing you have to be able to engage the candidate in a meaningful discussion about their career and to do that you have to understand what marketing is today.

One of the things you will see today in top executive search firms and firms that are really good at recruiting the best talent is that the talent that is working for them has been there for a long period of time. If you’ve got recruiters and professionals with in their office that have been there for five plus, seven plus, ten plus years, then you’re talking to a firm that’s completed a lot of searchers and done so in a quality way. If you look and find that most of the people inside the firm have been there 18 months or less what is it you’re really investing in as it relates to your search and how do you know those people have had time to be successful and time to build a track record of success. Within the specific firm that you’re getting ready to engage, longevity is very important.

I think one of the big questions you’ve got to ask is your talking to an executive search professional about this being potentially the right partner for you to work with to find top talent and it really is partnership, right, because when you engage that executive search firm they have to be able to one, provide you with the best talent and “B” engage that talent in a meaningful way that gets them excited about your role, and “c” engage your firm and understand how to get things accomplished inside your organization in a way that your organization can digest that. Interviewing, hiring, isn’t normally on people’s plate so how do I make it so we fit that in in a world where executives have very busy schedules. And so the person who is your executive search partners has to balance all those things and at the end of it they have to balance the negotiation so there really is an art and a science to it and you can pretty much tell when you’re talking to someone on the phone if they understand that and have done that successfully.

The number one thing you should be looking for in an executive search partner is their expertise in recruiting executives in your desired niche. For example, if you are searching for the CMO, your executive search partner must have experience in marketing executive recruitment that is very different from IT recruitment, sales recruitment, or any other niche.