Client-Side Best Practices – Adopt a Hiring Methodology
In today’s increasingly competitive world, leaving mission critical positions open longer than absolutely necessary is unacceptable. The lost productivity and opportunity costs are staggering. Following are two practices you can implement to limit these costs by getting better talent into your organization more quickly.
- Make sure you and your search firm adopt a hiring methodology and hiring focus, as opposed to having a perpetual search focus. It’s important to understand how your executive search process is impacted by you, your hiring methodology and your search firm. Unfortunately, having great candidates does not always result in making a great hire. The ability to take those candidates and move them through the hiring process quickly – from initial client interview, to follow up interviews, to offer – in a short window is very important not just to getting someone hired, but getting the right person hired. At MarketPro, we are known for getting a short list of candidates to our clients faster than anyone else in the industry. How do we do this? We have a team of experienced marketing professionals screening talent. Additionally, we benchmark every position at the start of the search process. This goes far beyond a typical search intake process conducted by most firms. In addition to the typical assignment study, and a position and candidate brief, we benchmark the position’s key deliverables necessary to move the company forward. Try this in your own company – develop functional, leadership, commitment and cultural benchmarks to maximize your success. Then, as we do, benchmark your candidates against these criteria and create a success profile. Only candidates for whom you can make a business case for clearing the mark move forward in the process. This is continually reevaluated as the process goes along and additional data is gathered.
- Send a clear message to your top-level candidates that your organization is one that values talent. More and more in today’s marketplace, a passive candidate puts himself or herself out into the search process and begins to do some comparison shopping. With unemployment at an all time low, and with top quality talent getting harder to find, I would be disappointed if the top candidates were not smart enough to do this. If you conduct a slow interview process or are viewed as having a weak employment brand, you will continually find yourself losing top candidates to your competitors. If you want to successfully onboard your next top performer, send a powerful message during the interview process about how your company values talent. The good news is that it’s a very easy and powerful step to incorporate.
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