Getting The Best Executive Search Experience

Identifying pivotal players and placing them in the world’s leading technology companies is inherently exciting.

We love it with a passion. Especially the responsibilities.

Not just our obvious accountability to the client – but also to all the other stakeholders in the process.

Think about the logistics…

For every person we place, our expert consultants may need to organise:

• 3 second interviews

• 5 first interviews

• 8 shortlisted professionals

• 16 phone interviews

• 50-80 long-list approaches to qualify the profiles of those expressing interest in the role.

This involves 200-400 phone calls to 75 people at around 30-50 different companies – for one role (and we typically need to fill 10 to 20 roles).

“It’s a numbers game!” I hear you say.

No. The highly skilled professionals we seek to place are quite obviously not numbers.

And this is no game. This is the structured methodology of our executive search process.

Not Everyone Can Win

That, by definition, is the nature of selection.

But – win or lose – everyone involved must have a positive experience.

In any race, the winner will always be far outnumbered by those who do not reach the podium.

Granted, everyone we meet is an elite player who is used to winning. We would not be considering them if it were not so.

And yet they’ve been around long enough to know the price of success is sometimes the humility of learning from failure.

So if – after all the interviews – they don’t get the job, they take it on the chin.

But only if the executive search process has been well organised by experienced professionals.

If not, there will be the risk of ill feeling.

Don’t Let Ill Feeling Fester

Badly planned and poorly delivered recruitment campaigns not only risk an unacceptable result today – they muddy the waters for the future.

If people don’t like how the race is run today, they won’t be lining up to compete the next time you need a winner.

And that will make it much harder for you to recruit key people over the coming years as your company expands.

This is one reason we recommend using a single executive search company. You get a properly coordinated recruitment drive – not a multi-agency free-for-all.

Beware the temptation of tasking multiple agencies. You may think it’s a shortcut…

But it risks creating bad feelings among the people you’re targeting because of all the overlapping, duplication and mixed messages these bun fights can often generate.

Ill feeling is more likely among those who don’t get the job. And that will almost certainly be amplified by the increased number of variables involved.

The talent pool must never be polluted by ill feelings. It is hugely valuable and must always be treated with the utmost respect.

Harnessing The Positive Experience

Contrast all the noise and ill feeling generated by a multi-agency maelstrom with the calm waters of the single-agency firm option.

Outsourcing your executive search to a single agency makes life so much easier for your in-house recruitment team and all managers involved in the hiring process.

There is one point of contact instead of half a dozen. One trusted partner implementing your recruitment instead of a handful of suppliers tripping over each other.

All that thrashing around by different providers creates ‘noise’, which can damage your reputation in subsequent hiring rounds.

Remember this – there is more than one measure of success in a good executive search campaign.

Success is not just the successful placement of winners who go on to achieve epic results (as crucially important as that is).

It is also the positive feedback from those who did not secure the role. And their willingness to be there for you the next time you need them.

It’s about creating a pool of people thirsting for success. Either quench that thirst by hiring them or tell them they’ll always be welcome back if they don’t make the cut first time around.

But whatever you do, don’t poison the waterhole with an ill-thought stampede.

Executive Search: Experience Is Everything

Especially when you have 27 years of it.